ORIGINAL PAPER Activated carbon derived from chitin aerogels: preparation and CO 2 adsorption Rohan S. Dassanayake . Chamila Gunathilake . Noureddine Abidi . Mietek Jaroniec Received: 4 September 2017 / Accepted: 10 January 2018 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V., part of Springer Nature 2018 Abstract Activated carbon was prepared by car- bonization and KOH activation of chitin aerogels. The resulting carbon featured high CO 2 adsorption of 5.02 mmol/g at 0 °C and 3.44 mmol/g at 25 °C under ambient pressure of 1 atm. The activated carbon showed a high specific surface area of * 520 m 2 /g, total pore volume of 0.30 cm 3 /g, and volume of micropores of * 0.19 cm 3 /g. KOH activation of carbonized chitin aerogels resulted in about 37-fold increase in the specific surface area and about 95-fold increase in the volume of micropores as compared to the as-synthesized chitin aerogel. These data indicate that the chitin-derived activated carbon can be used for adsorption-based environmental and related applications. Keywords Biopolymers Á Chitin Á CO 2 capture Á Aerogels Á Activated carbon Introduction A rapid increase in the atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases (GHGs) including carbon dioxide (CO 2 ), methane (CH 4 ), nitrous oxide (N 2 O) and fluorinated gases has become a major environmental concern due to their adverse effects on global warming and climate change. Among those GHGs, CO 2 is believed to be the major contributor of the global warming that has occurred over the past few decades. The burning of fossil fuels is the primary source of CO 2 , which can also be emitted from industrial processes and direct human activities such as defor- estation, land clearing for agriculture and degradation of soils. According to Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in USA, both liquid and solid fuels accounted for 75.2% of the global CO 2 emissions from fossil-fuel combus- tion and cement industry in 2013 (Boden et al. 2016). CO 2 capture and sequestration is a potential approach to reduce overwhelming CO 2 emissions. Thus, the carbon capture storage utilization (CCSU) technology has been recently developed for CO 2 capture. This CCSU technology involves capture of CO 2 from industrial or power plant systems, transportation to a storage location and its conversion to commercial Rohan S. Dassanayake and Chamila Gunathilake have contributed equally to this work. R. S. Dassanayake Á N. Abidi (&) Department of Plant and Soil Science, Fiber and Biopolymer Research Institute, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX 79403, USA e-mail: noureddine.abidi@ttu.edu C. Gunathilake Á M. Jaroniec (&) Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Kent State University, Kent, OH 44242, USA e-mail: jaroniec@kent.edu C. Gunathilake Department of Chemical and Process Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University of Peradeniya, Peradeniya 20400, Sri Lanka 123 Cellulose https://doi.org/10.1007/s10570-018-1660-3