Biomass-based porous carbon with Cu loading for CO₂ catalyzing

Biomass-based carbon with different pore size and excellent electrochemical performance has been widely investigated in catalyst and adsorbent field. The plentiful porous structure not only can adsorb CO<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</inf>, but also can load Cu nano particles to catalyze the reduction reaction. Meanwhile, the preparation process for porous carbon is simple and the biomass resources is very abundant and cheap. In this work, we used biomass carboxymethyl chitosan as the precursor and adopted a sol-gel method to obtain the porous carbon. $\mathrm{Cu}\left(\mathrm{NO}_{3}\right)_{2}$ was the metal precursor, and urea and $\mathrm{NH}_{4} \mathrm{~F}$ were used as the additive. The precursors mixture was freeze drying for 48 h, then was carbonized at $900^{\circ} \mathrm{C}$ for 2 h. The prepared catalyst had a high SSA, up to $107 \mathrm{~m}^{2} \mathbf{g}^{-1}$, and the pore size was different. The plentiful porous structure was good for adsorbing CO<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</inf>, the adsorbing capacity was up to $1.6 \mathrm{mmol} / \mathrm{g}$. And the catalyst exhibited a good catalyzing performance, the overpotential was -0.5 V at $10 \mathrm{~mA} \mathrm{~cm}^{-2}$. This work can provide some help for CO<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</inf> adsorbent and catalyst.