Activated carbons from oil palm shell for hydrogen storage

Abstract

Activated carbons (ACs) with controlled microporosity have been developed from oil palm shell and their H 2 storage performances been have tested at 77 K. Such adsorbents are the natural agricultural by-products of chemically activated with KOH. N 2 adsorption-desorption at 77 K was used to investigate the pore structure of the ACs produced with different weight ratio of KOH/oil palm shell charcoal. The results showed that the developed oil palm shell ACs achieved surface areas (S BET ) as high as 3508 m 2 /g and micropores volumes (V DR ) as high as 1.10 cm 3 /g. Outstanding storage capacities of hydrogen, as high as 6.8 wt.% have been obtained at 4 MPa and 2.86 wt.% have been obtained at 1 bar for some of these adsorbents at 77 K. These values of hydrogen adsorption are among the best that ever published so far, which well above those of some reference commercial materials, e.g. Maxsorb-3, and also the ACs from the open literature.