New Insights into Porous Materials in Adsorption and Catalysis

Dear Colleagues,

Porous materials have gained significant attention over the last few decades due to their versatile applications, ranging from adsorption and catalysis to drug loading for delivery purposes. New approaches and perspectives are continuously being explored to enhance their performance in these areas. Highly effective porous materials are required to improve features in catalysis and adsorption fields. Therefore, the imperative and challenging task has been to create and produce low-cost, highly efficient, and stable porous materials suitable for a broad range of practical applications on a large scale. The primary objective of this Special Issue of Molecules is to gather new approaches on research, development, and applications of porous materials for sustainable heterogeneous catalysis and environmental remediation.

Topics including (i) sustainable and new methods of increasing the active sites of porous catalysts and adsorbents; (ii) development of new catalytic routes in biomass valorisation for sustainable and scalable synthesis methods for porous materials; and (iii) design and synthesis of porous materials with specific pore sizes and structures to target the adsorption and catalysis of different molecules will be covered. Original findings and literature reviews that offer fundamental insights into the design and engineering of cost-effective, efficient, and stable porous materials for application in the proposed fields are particularly welcome.

Dr. Márcia G. Ventura
Dr. Ines Matos
Dr. Maria Bernardo
Guest Editors

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• catalysis
• adsorption
• environmental remediation
• water and air purification
• soil remediation
• gas storage/upgrade
• carbon dioxide capture
• biomass to biofuel conversion

Title: Structural and kinetic study of phenol adsorption on activated charcoal
Authors: Delia Omenat-Morán ([email protected]); Carlos J. Durán Valle ([email protected]); Manuel A. Martínez-Cañas ([email protected])
Affiliation: Tecnological AgriFood Institute, Centre for Scientific Research and Technology in Extremadura, Government of Extremadura, Badajoz, Spain (D. Omenat Moran and M.A. Martínez-Cañas) Department of Organic and Inorganic Chemistry, Faculty of Sciences, IACYS, Universidad de Extremadura, Badajoz, 06006, Spain (C.J. Durán-Valle)
Abstract: Activated carbons have been prepared from kenaf core. These activated carbons and a commercial one have been surface modified with mineral acids. A complete characterisation of these adsorbents has been carried out. The kinetics of phenol adsorption on these carbons was studied in order to elucidate the adsorption mechanism. Furthermore, DFT calculations have been carried out to establish how phenol interacts with the surface of the activated carbons and which are the most stable adsorption positions.