Electrospinning prepared nickel-based carbon fibers with enhanced adsorption capacity for adsorption desulfurization of fuels

Enhanced adsorption capacity of adsorbents with excellent regeneration properties always remained the focus of researchers in the adsorptive desulfurization (ADS) technology. In this paper, we report an electrospinning method to prepare nickel-based carbon fibers (NCF), and their adsorption desulfurization performance was compared with those of nickel-based carbon particles (NCP) obtained via traditional solid-state grinding method. The results demonstrated that compared with NCP, NCF contained more abundant mesoporous specific surface area and mesopore volume, well-distributed active metal sites, which would be beneficial to their enhanced adsorption desulfurization performance. As a result, the adsorption capacity of NCF was as high as 13.13 mg S/g in the ADS of thiophene, and its regeneration performance was also far better than that of NCP. In addition, the adsorption process of thiophene was briefly analyzed from the perspective of kinetics, which demonstrated that the adsorption of thiophene in NCF and NCP were both in accordance with the pseudo-second-order kinetic model.