Synthesis of porous carbon via a waste tire leavening strategy for adsorptive desulfurization

Adsorptive desulfurization is an effective technology for removing harmful sulfur under mild conditions. Carbon materials have many advantages and are often used in adsorption desulfurization research, but until now have been synthesized using complicated methods and have shown limited adsorption capacity. Using an NaHCO3-assisted leavening method, waste tires were in the current work used as raw materials to produce hierarchically porous carbon that exhibits a high specific surface area and abundant oxygen-containing functional groups. In contrast to the sulfur removal by the carbon material prepared using a commonly used method, the as-prepared carbon material shows excellent adsorption performance, and was able to achieve an ultra-deep desulfurization of pentanethiol, specifically removing up to 99.7% of the sulfur from a model fuel with an initial sulfur concentration of 28 ppm. Therefore, we have provided a simple method for synthesizing adsorbents with high adsorption performance, and we expect these adsorbents to be used for industrial adsorptive desulfurization.