CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Porous carbons have a wide range of uses in industry, such as catalyst support and supercapacitor electrodes. They may be produced by pyrolysis of synthetic resins (e.g. resorcinol/formaldehyde). In this paper, porous resins are manufactured by the condensation of natural monomers (tannin), semi-synthetic (furfural) and synthetic (formaldehyde). The resins are dried without a porosity stabilizer or special drying procedures and are pyrolyzed in an inert atmosphere at high temperatures (> 800 ° C). The specific capacity (F/g) of the carbons is measured by cyclic voltammetry and AC impedance spectroscopy. The carbons can be chemically sulfonated using sulfonating agents (e.g. fuming sulfuric acid) and its activity as acid catalysts for the synthesis of biodiesel is measured. These materials are novel, since so far only the aerogels (supercritical drying) and cryogels (lyophilization) have been studied and the synthetic procedure described here is much simpler.. The carbon materials have high porosity, including micropores (d < 2 nm) and mesopores (2 nm < d < 50 nm). The nanoporous carbon materials can be used as electrodes in electrochemical double layer supercapacitors. Specific capacities in excess of 200 F/g are obtained. The capacitance depends strongly on the charging/discharging rate likely due to the slow movcement of ions inside the pores. The sulfonated carbon materials were tested for the esterification of acetic acid with ethanol and oleic acid with ethanol are obtained, which showed good conversion to esters. Thus it has been possible to produce carbon materials for use in supercapacitors and catalysts for the biodiesel synthesis using porous synthetic carbons bases on biomass products. Keywords: carbon, biomass, supercapacitors, biodiesel

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