Synthesis of High Quality Porous Carbon from Water Hyacinth
Water Hyacinth (WH) is a plant that can absorb various pollutants in water. However, this plant is categorized as an invasive plant that can become a weed in the waters. To improve the functionality of WH, processing of WH is needed to be used for various applications. One of modifications of WH is as porous carbon for battery cathode composite. In this paper, we reported a synthesis of a porous carbon from WH. WH is processed into carbon by carbonization at various temperatures of 400, 500 and 600 °C with various activators of KOH, H3PO4 and ZnCl2 to obtain high quality porous carbon which has high electrical conductivity, large specific surface area and large porous volume. All synthesized carbons were characterized by proximate analysis measurements, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), and N2 adsorption-desorption measurements. The highest carbon fixed content of 37.79% is obtained from charcoal with a carbonization temperature of 400 °C. The largest specific surface area of 264.77 m2/g was obtained from activated carbon with H3PO4 as activator. The values of pore volume and pore radius were 0.186 cm3/g and 1.56 nm, respectively.