الفهرس 
INTRODUCTIONOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Mesoporous carbon (MC) has attracted increasing attention, due to its unique properties, such as extraordinary chemical, mechanical, and thermal stability, and wide abundance in nature. Nowadays, the widespread applications of MCs in areas, such as supercapacitors, chemical sensors, catalyst supports, fuel cells and separation sorbents, have encouraged researchers to synthesize porous carbons with high mesoporous volume proportions and a high specific surface area (SSA). Therefore, it is important to develop reliable methods for the preparation of MCs with controllable porosity, together with high SSA and large pore volume. In the past decades, numerous carbon resources, such as fossil-based hydrocarbons (e.g., bituminous coal, lignite), biomass (e.g., glucose, cellulose, lignin and wood), and polymers, have been utilized for the preparation of MCs. In particular, biomass including cellulose, lignin, and their platform molecules, provides an abundant feedstock for the preparation of carbon materials. Due to the presence of plentiful oxygen in the biomass resource, the carbons derived from biomass generally contain oxygen-containing groups, which may provide the carbons with specific functions. Thus, the preparation of porous carbons from biomass has attracted significant attention. For the preparation of porous carbon materials, porogens, such as surfactants salts and their
mixtures are generally required, Zinc chloride (ZnCl2) is one of the porogen most widely used in the preparation of activated carbon (AC) from biomass (e.g., olive stones, oil palm shells, and Kraft lignin), and can result in porous carbon materials with high SSAs (e.g., 800–2170 m2 g-1) and high carbon yields.
However, the proportions of mesopores in the resultant ACs are generally low (5–40%).Recently, Antoinette and coworkers utilized eutectic salt composed of ZnCl2 and chloride salts as a porogen to regulate the pore diameters of the carbon materials derived from ionic liquids. They found that the combination of ZnCl2 with different salts could tune the pore size of the resultant carbons. For example, LiCl/ZnCl2 resulted in microporous carbons; NaCl/ZnCl2 afforded microporous and small mesoporous carbons, while KCl/ZnCl2 mainly resulted in MCs with large mesopores. The ZnCl2-based eutectic salt showed promising potential for the preparation of MCs. However, it has seldom been applied in the preparation of MCs from biomass carbonization.
In this work, biomass including glucose or agriculture waste (potato peels) were used as the carbon resource, and KCl/ZnCl2 mixture with definite molar ratio as the porogen agent for the preparation of MCs.
The resultant samples were examined by means of different techniques, including X-ray diffraction (XRD), N2 sorption, transmission electron microscopy (TEM), TGA, and FTIR.
So, the main aim of this work is to use environmental-friendly materials (low-cost mesopours carbon) as adsorbents for the treatment of pharmaceutical effluents. A really difficult category of environmental pollutants is that consisted of pharmaceutical compounds. Many of these compounds are not completely removed by wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) and consequently they are detectable in WWTP effluents, surface water and ground and drinking water all over the world. Therefore, the environmental impact of drugs/compounds is crucial. Mesopours carbon is the most promising adsorbent material, presenting high adsorption capacity for many pollutants (dyes, metals etc.). However, the need to turn on more environmental-friendly materials leads to the use of low-cost ones derived from agricultural sources. In the present study, potato peels (supplied as wastes from restaurants) were used to produce samples of carbons after hydrothermally treatment. The adsorption evaluation was done with a series of adsorption–desorption experiments studying major parameters as the effect of pH, temperature, initial drug concentration, contact time and cycles of reuse.