Abstract. Carbon spheres (CSs) retaining the morphology of potato starch were prepared by a twostep process: impregnation followed by carbonization. In this process, potato starch was impregnated in NH4Cl solution for 1 h. The mechanism of preparation was proposed. The presence of HCl catalyzes the dehydration of impregnated starch at lower temperature than its melting point, which destroy…
Abstract. A systematic, time-dependent, surface-sensitive study has, for the first time, given new insights into the mechanism of the often-used, but unexplained, sulfuric/nitric acid oxidation of graphene-containing materials, such as carbon fibers and carbon nanotubes. We used X-ray photoelectron, photoacoustic FTIR and Raman spectroscopies to follow the evolution of the functionalizatio…
Abstract. We report a modified method to synthesize SBA-16 mesostructured silica under refluxing condition using block co-polymer poly(ethylene oxide)–poly(propylene oxide)–poly(ethylene oxide) (F127) as template, cetyltrimethylammonium bromide (CTAB) as co-template, and tetraethyl orthosilicate (TEOS) as silica source. The physiochemical properties of SBA-16 silica were characterized b…