Engineered carbon materials

The success of carbon materials relies on the huge applications they find as gas sequestering materials (CO, CO2, NO2, H2S, VOCs, etc.), in heterogeneous catalysis (hydrogenation, oxidation, etc), in sensing and, most of all, as catalyst supports in electrocatalysis. The nature of the support has a strong influence on some important properties of the catalyst, such as dispersion of the active phase, inhibition of sintering and loss of the catalyst during operation, morphology of the metallic crystallites and electrochemically active area. Furthermore, the chosen support material may affect the mass and charge transport properties (an efficient three-phase reaction zone at nanoscale is highly desirable) and electronic conductivity of the catalytic layer. Hence, one of the routes pursued to improve the catalyst efficiency is the development of new carbon supports with improved physicochemical and morphological properties. We are interested in the preparation of mesoporous carbon with large accessible pores (LPMC) via hard-template by using mesoporous silica or via soft-template approach by using poly(ethylene oxide)-b-polystyrene (PEO-b-PS) as both template and carbon precursor. The aim is the preparation of small diameter (50-100 nm) carbon NPs with high BET surface areas (up to 500 m2 g-1), tunable pore diameter in the range of 13-32 nm and good conductivity. LPMC of appropriate particle dimension and porosity would allow obtaining a more dispersible catalyst ink, resulting in a homogeneous and reproducible casting deposition for electrochemical analysis. Here we exploit our experience in ATRP to control the polymerization toward the desired product.

Nitrogen-doped mesoporous carbons are interesting materials for both PEM-FC and electrolysers due to the low cost and interesting catalytic activity towards oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) and hydrogen evolution reaction (HER). In Figure are reported some example of catalysts synthetized in our laboratory