MgO-decorated carbon nanotubes for CO₂ adsorption: first principles calculations

The global greenhouse effect makes it urgent to deal with the increasing greenhouse gases. In this paper the performance of MgO-decorated carbon nanotubes for CO₂ adsorption is investigated through first principles calculations. The results show that the MgO-decorated carbon nanotubes can adsorb CO₂ well and are relatively insensitive to O₂ and N₂ at the same time. The binding energy arrives at 1.18 eV for the single-MgO-decorated carbon nanotube adsorbing one CO₂ molecule, while the corresponding values for O₂ and N₂ are 0.55 eV and 0.06 eV, respectively. In addition, multi-molecule adsorption is also proved to be very satisfactory. These results indicate that MgO-decorated carbon nanotubes have great potential applications in industrial and environmental processes.