Effects of TETA or TEPA Loading on CO2 Adsorption Properties Using Pore-Expanded KIT-6 as Support

Mesoporous silica pore-expanded KIT-6 was synthesized using tetraethoxysilane (TEOS) as the silica source, tri-block copolymer (P123) as a structure-directing agent and 1,3,5-trimethylbenzene (TMB) as swelling agents by a hydrothermal method. Then, pore-expanded KIT-6 (PE-KIT-6) was modified with different amounts of amines including triethylenetetramine (TETA) and tetraethylenepentamine (TEPA) by a post-synthetic impregnation method. The samples were characterized by small-angle X-ray diffraction (XRD), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), N2 adsorption/desorption, elemental analysis and thermal gravimetric analysis (TGA). Experimental results revealed that the modifiers were introduced into the samples and the CO2 adsorption capacity increased first and then decreased with the increase of TETA/TEPA loadings. Under the same loadings of TETA/TEPA, the samples modified by TEPA exhibited better CO2 adsorption capacities than the samples modified by TETA because TEPA has one more amine group than TETA in the molecule. The results also indicated that the samples had good adsorption capacities at the loadings ranging from 30% to 35%. Among them, the sample modified by TEPA with the loading of 35% had the maximum adsorption capacity of 2.9[Formula: see text]mmol/g. After five cycles of adsorption/desorption, the adsorption capacity only dropped 4.59%, indicating that the adsorbent of PE-KIT-6 modified by TEPA has good cyclic stability.