Fabrication of Fullerene-Pillared Porous Graphene and Its Water Vapor Adsorption

Porous carbons with large pore volumes and surface areas provide high performance in gas separation, water purification, and storage. Carbon composites comprising nanocarbons can offer uniform pore structures with unique adsorption properties. In this work, we prepared fullerene-pillared porous graphene by bottom-up processing and demonstrated its water vapor adsorption properties both experimentally and through the grand canonical Monte Carlo simulations. Fullerene-pillared porous graphene with 4% fullerene slightly adsorbed water vapor, and the adsorption amount decreased on highly laminated fullerene-pillared porous graphene with 5% fullerene owing to nanopore collapse. Fullerene-pillared porous graphene with 25 ± 8% fullerene had the largest water vapor adsorption capacity at 40% relative humidity. On the contrary, fullerene-pillared porous graphene with 50% fullerene showed reduced water vapor adsorption, consistent with the simulation results showing that inadequate nanospaces prevented water cluster formation because of excess fullerene molecules. Therefore, the best candidate with high adsorption capacity and uniform nanopores was found to be the fullerene-pillared porous graphene with a 25 ± 8% fullerene filling ratio.