Desforges, Alexandre and Bridi, Angélica Vieira and Kadok, Joris and Flahaut, Emmanuel and Le Normand, François and Gleize, Jérôme and Bellouard, Christine and Ghanbaja, Jaafar and Vigolo, Brigitte
Dramatic enhancement of double-walled carbon nanotube quality through a one-pot tunable purification method.
(2016)
Carbon, 110. 292-303. ISSN 0008-6223
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(Document in English)
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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.carbon.2016.09.033
Abstract
The purification process we propose is a one-pot gas-phase treatment; the CNT powder is simply submitted to a chlorine/oxygen atmosphere at around 1000 °C for 2 h. By varying the oxygen content in an excess of chlorine, the conditions were optimized in order to efficiently remove both metal (catalyst) and carbon impurities from DWCNT samples. Even if a high amount of sample is lost under the oxidative conditions used, a selective elimination of the carbon impurities obviously occurs and a metal impurity removal yield of 99% is obtained from thermogravimetry. Based on a multi-technique approach, we show that the purified DWCNTs are of high structural quality without any surface functionalization. This improvement of the wall quality through the chlorine/oxygen action is seen in particular with a division by 15 of the D over G band intensity of the Raman spectra. Among the existing procedures, the advantages of our purification method are indisputably its simplicity, low time-consuming and high efficiency combined with an enhanced quality of the purified CNTs. Such quasi-pure DWCNTs have high interest since they offer a unique opportunity to study the intrinsic properties and effects of the nanotubes themselves.
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