Development of Advanced Activated Biocarbon from Corn Distiller Soluble via Two-Step Carbonization: Investigating the Synergistic Effects of ZnO and K toward Enhanced CO<sub>2</sub> Capture
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The excessive emissions of CO 2 into the atmosphere have a severe impact on the ecological environment. Activated carbon (AC) offers a promising strategy for cost-effective carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) emissions mitigation as a solid adsorbent. The chemical activation process, which involves direct mixing of an activating agent with biomass, is a common method to achieve a porous morphology and high surface area in AC. Herein, an advanced and highly microporous activated biocarbon was synthesized using a two-step carbonization process consisting of hydrothermal synthesis of the ZnO/C carbon precursor based on condensed corn distiller soluble (CDS) followed by potassium hydroxide (KOH) activation at 700 °C for 60 min. The results indicated that the synergistic use of ZnO and K plays a complementary role in structural development and functional enhancement. This synthesis strategy resulted in advanced activated biocarbon with a significantly higher surface area of 1744.6 m 2 g –1, outperforming biocarbon activated with KOH alone. In this study, it was hypothesized that KOH would penetrate and activate the ZnO/C carbon precursor more effectively than the direct activation of CDS. The resulting advanced activated biocarbon materials were systematically investigated through comprehensive microstructural, physicochemical, interfacial, textural, and thermal analyses. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) revealed a superior 3D hierarchical structure enriched with micropores, favorable mesopores, and interconnected macropores of synthesized biocarbon. Furthermore, CO 2 adsorption capacities were performed at various temperatures (273, 288, 298, and 308 K). The highest adsorption capacities, ranging from 3.70 to 6.30 mol kg –1, were observed at 1 bar and 273 K for all advanced activated biocarbon samples. Notably, the combined catalytic and templating effects of ZnO and K resulted in a highly porous structure with a high surface area, abundant adsorption sites, and excellent selective CO 2 capture properties.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".