PAN-based activated carbon nanofiber/metal oxide composites for CO and CH adsorption: influence of metal oxide.

In the present study, we successfully prepared two different electrospun polyacrylonitrile (PAN) based-activated carbon nanofiber (ACNF) composites by incorporation of well-distributed FeO and CoO nanoparticles (NPs). The influence of metal oxide on the structural, morphological, and textural properties of final composites was thoroughly investigated. The results showed that the morphological and textural properties could be easily tuned by changing the metal oxide NPs. Even though, the ACNF composites were not chemically activated by any activation agent, they presented relatively high surface areas (S) calculated by Brunauer-Emmett-Teller (BET) equation as 212.21 and 185.12 m/g for ACNF/FeO and ACNF/CoO composites, respectively. Furthermore, the ACNF composites were utilized as candidate adsorbents for CO and CH adsorption. The ACNF/FeO and ACNF/CoO composites resulted the highest CO adsorption capacities of 1.502 and 2.166 mmol/g at 0 °C, respectively, whereas the highest CH adsorption capacities were obtained to be 0.516 and 0.661 mmol/g at 0 °C by ACNF/FeO and ACNF/CoO composites, respectively. The isosteric heats calculated lower than 80 kJ/mol showed that the adsorption processes of CO and CH were mainly dominated by physical adsorption for both ACNF composites. Our findings indicated that ACNF-metal oxide composites are useful materials for designing of CO and CH adsorption systems.