On 19 June at 12:15 Maike Käärik will defend her doctoral thesis „Nanoporous carbon: the controlled nanostructure, and structure-property relationships“.
Supervisors:
Senior Research Fellow Jaan Leis (PhD), Institute of Chemistry, University of Tartu
Senior Research Fellow Uko Maran (PhD), Institute of Chemistry, University of Tartu
Opponent:
Prof Dr Elzbieta Frackowiak (PhD), Poznan University of Technology, Institute of Chemistry and Technical Electrochemistry (Poola)
Summary
Environmental issues are becoming increasingly topical every year and therefore mankind is forced to pay more and more attention to the so-called green materials. Such materials also include nanoporous carbon, which has already shown excellent results in, for example, molecular sieves for the purification and binding of gases and liquids, the selective separation of ions, and also as a catalyst support and electrode material in alternative energy sources. All of these applications require an optimal nanostructure for the carbon material, so it is crucial to be able to purposefully influence the formation and porosity of nanostructures in carbon synthesis. Therefore, more and more accurate information is needed about the effects of the structural properties of nanoporous carbon on various application metrics.
The dissertation focuses on searching for relationships between the properties of carbide-derived carbon (CDC) and the experiment-derived structure descriptors and the development of corresponding data driven multi-linear regression models using the quantitative nano-structure-property relationship (QnSPR) approach. To this end, more than 200 different micro- and macrostructured carbon materials were synthesized, varying starting carbide, synthesis conditions and post-processing methods and all data were pooled into a unique database of nanoporous carbons. Thus, the study provides a comprehensive overview of the effect of pore size distribution measured by N2 and CO2 adsorption on electrical double-layer capacitance.
As a result of this research, for the first time, it was possible to construct multiparametric mathematical models for describing and predicting the application-relevant physical property of porous carbon using experiment-derived structure descriptors. The derived QnSPR models describe the electrical double-layer capacitance of a nanoporous carbon with both fully microporous and micro-mesoporous pore distributions, and allow accurate prediction of the electrical double-layer capacitance in alternative energy sources.