Characteristics and carbon dioxide adsorption performance of candle soot-activated by potassium hydroxide

Abstract

Incomplete combustion by fossil fuel has contributed to the increase in carbon dioxide (CO2) emission as well as carbon soot production. Several methods have been done via carbon capture and storage (CCS) strategy to mitigate CO2 emission such as via adsorption. However, a method to utilize the carbon soot production was still in question. Less discussion on utilizing soot as gas adsorbent up to this date. Therefore, this paper aimed to investigate the CO2 adsorption performance from fresh candle soot (FS) and soot activated by potassium hydroxide (KOH) with mass ratio 2/1 KOH to soot (KOH-S1). The activation process was done by using muffle furnace at 700 °C for 1 h under vacuum condition. FTIR spectrum of the KOH-S1 appeared at 3500, 1639, 1048 and 1740 cm-1 due to KOH treatment before activation. The mean diameter for KOH-S1 particles was larger (22.328 µm) than FS (4.413 µm) due to agglomeration. The adsorption capacity obtained for KOH-S1 and FS were 24.4092 and 10.3052 mg/g respectively. It has been demonstrated that KOH-S1 has excellent potential to be used for CO2 adsorption and more studies need to conducted for its development.