Microfibers of microporous carbon obtained from the pyrolysis of electrospun β-cyclodextrin/pyromellitic dianhydride nanosponges

Novel activated carbon materials are being constantly developed and applied in many research and industrial applications. The choice of the precursor represents a key step, to achieve satisfying resulting features in terms of surface development, structural features, carbon contents, and amount of ash. In this work, a novel carbon product has been obtained starting from an electrospun b-cyclodextrin/pyromellitic dianhydride linked nanosponge. After the pyrolysis, the polymeric mat resulted in carbon material still displaying fibrous morphology, characterized by a diameters distribution of 1.3 ± 0.5 mm. A peculiar granular microstructure was observed via FESEM, a 692m2/g surface area and a 5e12 Å pore size dis- resulted after z potential analysis. These results confirmed b-cyclodextrin/PMDA-linked electrospun tribution, with pore volume of 0.14 cm3/g, resulted via BET characterization, while ?32.8 ± 0.7 mV nanosponges as a suitable precursor for a novel carbon material preparation.