Unzipping carbon nanotubes to nanoribbons for revealing the mechanism of nonradical oxidation by carbocatalysis

By Qi Yang, Yidi Chen, Xiaoguang Duan, Shanke Zhou, Yue Niu, Hongqi Sun, L. Zhi, Shaobin Wang. 2020

162 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Graphitic multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) are controllably unzipped into edge-rich graphene nanoribbons to reveal the roles of edges and defects in persulfate activation for bisphenol A (BPA) oxidation. Enriched carbon edges remarkably enhance the catalytic performance and can serve as hosting sites for heteroatom (N, S) doping to promote carbocatalysis. A sample (NS-2) presented a complete BPA removal in 20 min at a rate constant of 0.182 min-1. The rate constants were relating to the defect speciation in a negative correlation to an indicator (ID/ID’) from Raman spectra. Excessive edges induce defects and structure transformation of sp2 to sp3, resulting in deterioration of the organic oxidation. Furthermore, unzipped MWCNTs were clarified to follow a nonradical electron transfer pathway by radical screening tests, in situ Raman and electrochemical characterizations. The unveiled mechanism emphasizes the importance of an essential graphitic degree and conductivity in the edge-enriched carbocatalysts for better catalytic performance.

Subfields: Materials Chemistry, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment, Water Science and Technology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6177de2501f832c346e243bd976df1cc95f5645e