| Ordered mesoporous carbon (OMC) materials have attracted great interests from NASA due to their remarkable properties, such as high specific surface area, regular and tunable pore size. These features show great potential for being used in the water recovery system (WRS) in the International Space Station (ISS) as potential adsorbents. Various methods have been explored on the OMC preparation and modification to achieve better adsorption results. In this research, acrylic acid was used as a carbon precursor to synthesize OMC using a common silica mesoporous template (SBA-15). The influence of silica template amount was tested by using different ratios of SBA-15 to acrylic acid. The modification processes were conducted by immersing methods using four different aqueous solutions: 30% ammonium hydroxide, 0.1% sodium hydroxide, 1 mol/L aluminum chloride, and 0.02 g/mL urea solution. BET-SSA, FT-IR, TEM, TGA, and XRD were used to characterize the structures of OMCs and modified OMCs. It demonstrated that all the products had well-ordered hexagonal structure. The modifying procedures had eroded the surface of the OMC, but the highly ordered structures had been preserved based on the TEM and XRD results. FT-IR analysis indicated that the functional groups were introduced to the surface of the modified OMCs, which affected the adsorption capacity significantly. Resorcinol, a typical total organic carbon (TOC) model compound, was selected to evaluate the adsorption behavior of the OMCs and modified OMCs. Adsorption study illustrates that OMC produced by 3:1 ratio of SBA-15 to acrylic acid showed a higher adsorption capacity than that of OMCs produced with other ratios. The ammonium hydroxide modified OMC had the highest adsorption capacity of 40.6 mg/g for resorcinol removal, compared with that of the other three modified OMCs. |
