AAAR 33rd Annual Conference
October 20 - October 24, 2014
Rosen Shingle Creek
Orlando, Florida, USA
Abstract View
Aminated Reduced Graphene Oxide-Titanium Dioxide Nanocomposites (AGOTi) for Carbon Dioxide Capture and Photoreduction
YAO NIE, Wei-Ning Wang, Yi Jiang, John Fortner, Pratim Biswas, Washington University in St. Louis
Abstract Number: 288 Working Group: Nanoparticles and Materials Synthesis
Abstract Carbon dioxide (CO2) capture and utilization is a promising technology to potentially address global climate change. The photocatalytic conversion of CO2 into hydrocarbon fuels has attracted abundant research attention in recent years (Wang et al., 2012). However, so far there have been few reports about CO2 capture using the same material as CO2 conversion. In this work, aminated reduced graphene oxide-TiO2 (AGOTi) nanocomposites, synthesized using a one-step furnace aerosol reactor method, were demonstrated to effectively capture and photo-reduce CO2. In the method, ethylenediamine (EDA) solution was added to the TiO2 and GO precursor to functionalize the GO surface with amino groups. To achieve the desired nanocomposites, the TiO2/GO ratio, the EDA/GO ratio and the furnace temperature were all optimized. Our CO2 capture results showed that there was no obvious capture for pure GOTi; while after being functionalized with amino groups, a high adsorption of CO2 was observed. This provided direct evidence that surface functionalization of graphene oxide with amino groups could greatly enhance the capture of CO2. When the temperature increased above 473 K, both capture and photoreduction performance decreased significantly, which indicated that synthesis temperature could determine the abundance of functional groups on the AGOTi nanocomposite surface, thus affecting the overall performance. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), flourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy, and Raman spectroscopy were performed to evaluate the size, morphology, and surface chemistry of AGOTi material. Based on the characterization results, the mechanisms of CO2 adsorption and photoreduction on AGOTi will be discussed in this work.
References
Wang W.N. et al., (2012), JACS, 134, 11276-11281.