Hydrothermal carbons from hemicellulose-derived aqueous hydrolysis products as electrode materials for supercapacitors.

Acid pretreatment of lignocellulosic biomass, required for bioethanol production, generates large amounts of by-products, such as lignin and hydrolyzed hemicellulose fractions, which have found so far very limited applications. In this work, we demonstrate how the recovered hemicellulose hydrolysis products can be effectively utilized as a precursor for the synthesis of functional carbon materials through hydrothermal carbonization (HTC). The morphology and chemical structure of the synthesized HTC carbons are thoroughly characterized to highlight their similarities with glucose-derived HTC carbons.

Carbohydrate-derived hydrothermal carbons: a thorough characterization study.

Hydrothermal carbonization (HTC) is an aqueous-phase route to produce carbon materials using biomass or biomass-derived precursors. In this paper, a comprehensive physicochemical and textural characterization of HTC materials obtained using four different precursors, namely, xylose, glucose, sucrose, and starch, is presented. The development of porosity in the prepared HTC materials as a function of thermal treatment (under an inert atmosphere) was specifically monitored using N(2) and CO(2) sorption analysis.

Renewable nitrogen-doped hydrothermal carbons derived from microalgae.

Nitrogen-doped carbon materials are synthesized via an effective, sustainable, and green one-step route based on the hydrothermal carbonization of microalgae with high nitrogen content (ca. 11 wt %). The addition of the monosaccharide glucose to the reaction mixture is found to be advantageous, enhancing the fixation of nitrogen in the synthesized carbons, resulting in materials possessing nitrogen content in excess of 7 wt %, and leading to promising reaction yields.

Hydrothermal carbon from biomass: structural differences between hydrothermal and pyrolyzed carbons via 13C solid state NMR.

The objective of this paper is to better describe the structure of the hydrothermal carbon (HTC) process and put it in relationship with the more classical pyrolytic carbons. Indeed, despite the low energetic impact and the number of applications described so far for HTC, very little is known about the structure, reaction mechanism, and the way these materials relate to coals. Are HTC and calcination processes equivalent? Are the structures of the processed materials related to each other in any way? Which is the extent of polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) inside HTC? In this work, the effect of hydrothermal treatment and pyrolysis are compared on glucose, a good model carbohydrate; a detailed single-quantum double-quantum (SQ-DQ) solid state (13)C NMR study of the HTC and calcined HTC is used to interpret the spectral region corresponding to the signal of furanic and arene groups.