Application of a Novel Density Functional Theory to the Pore Size Analysis of Micro/mesoporous Carbons

Recently, we have suggested a model of adsorption in pores with amorphous and microporous solids walls, named the quenched solid density functional theory (QSDFT), that had been successfully applied to modeling adsorption in pores of siliceous materials [1]. This novel approach, which takes into account roughness and corrugation of pore walls, has been extended to carbon adsorbents. QSDFT represents a multicomponent non-local density functional theory (NLDFT), in which the solid is treated as a quenched component with a fixed spatially distributed density. In this paper, we have applied the QSDFT model to calculations of pore size distributions in various carbons (e.g. active carbons, active carbon fibers, ordered mesoporous carbons such as CMK1). We demonstrate that the account for surface heterogeneity improves significantly the reliability of pore size analysis of carbon materials.