Facile synthesis of hierarchical porous carbon material by potassium tartrate activation for chloramphenicol removal

Potassium tartrate as activator was used to produce porous carbon materials (PCMs) by activating petroleum cokes (PC), fallen leaves (FL), chicken feathers (CF) and Enteromorpha prolifera (EP) under the identical conditions (activation temperature of 750 °C, impregnation ratio of 2.5:1 and activation time of 1 h). Potassium tartrate can also be self-activated to facilely synthesize PCMs simultaneously. The PCMs synthesized through various precursors showed significant discrepancies in morphologies and the porous structure was characterized by SEM and N 2 adsorption–desorption isotherm. The BET surface areas of FL-PCM (1721 m 2 /g), CF-PCM (1819 m 2 /g), and EP-PCM (2151 m 2 /g) were larger than that of PC-PCM (256 m 2 /g) and the microporosity of EP-PCM (48%) was much lower than those of others. In addition, the adsorption properties of the four PCMs under various conditions were detected by selecting chloramphenicol (CAP) as a target adsorbate. The kinetics and isotherms of adsorption processes were well fitted by pseudo-second-order and Langmuir model for four PCMs. Meanwhile, EP-PCM exhibited high adsorption capacity of 892.86 mg/g.