Green Chemistry Blog

Scientists from Germany and Japan have developed a method to synthesize nitrogen-doped carbon aerogels (CA) from sustainable starting materials.

Aerogels are coherent, highly porous solid materials with attractive physical properties such as low density, excellent mass-transfer properties, low thermal conductivity, and low dielectric permittivity.  Previous methods to synthesize nitrogen-doped CA have several disadvantages, as the materials are phenol-based with low conductivity and relatively inert, making post-chemical modification challenging.

In this work, White and co-workers employed D-glucose and ovalbumin as sustainable precursors to produce nitrogen-doped CA, with the protein acting as the nitrogen donor and surface stabilizing agent.  The resulting aerogels have high surface area with large diameter mesopores and excellent hierarchical transport architecture.  Post-carbonization treatment controls the surface chemistry giving tunable physicochemical properties on a unique continuous 3D carbonaceous pore structure.  This method should help the development of sustainable carbon aerogels suitable for a range of applications.

To read the full article, please click on the link below!  This article is free to access until September 6th.

A sustainable synthesis of nitrogen-doped carbon aerogels, Robin J. White, Noriko Yoshizawa, Markus Antonietti and Maria-Magdalena Titirici, Green Chem., 2011, DOI: 10.1039/C1GC15349H