Scholarly Works, Chemistry

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https://hdl.handle.net/10919/23843
Research articles, presentations, and other scholarship

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Browsing Scholarly Works, Chemistry by Department "Civil and Environmental Engineering"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Exceptional capacitive deionization rate and capacity by block copolymer–based porous carbon fibers
    Liu, Tianyu; Serrano, Joel; Elliott, John; Yang, Xiaozhou; Cathcart, William; Wang, Zixuan; He, Zhen; Liu, Guoliang (American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2020-04-17)
    Capacitive deionization (CDI) is energetically favorable for desalinating low-salinity water. The bottlenecks of current carbon-based CDI materials are their limited desalination capacities and time-consuming cycles, caused by insufficient ion-accessible surfaces and retarded electron/ion transport. Here, we demonstrate porous carbon fibers (PCFs) derived from microphase-separated poly(methyl methacrylate)-block-polyacrylonitrile (PMMA-b-PAN) as an effective CDI material. PCF has abundant and uniform mesopores that are interconnected with micropores. This hierarchical porous structure renders PCF a large ion-accessible surface area and a high desalination capacity. In addition, the continuous carbon fibers and interconnected porous network enable fast electron/ion transport, and hence a high desalination rate. PCF shows desalination capacity of 30 mgNaCl g⁻¹ PCF and maximal time-average desalination rate of 38.0 mgNaCl g⁻¹ PCF min⁻¹, which are about 3 and 40 times, respectively, those of typical porous carbons. Our work underlines the promise of block copolymer–based PCF for mutually high-capacity and high-rate CDI.
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    Nanoparticulate Ni(OH)₂ Films Synthesized from Macrocyclic Nickel(II) Cyclam for Hydrogen Production in Microbial Electrolysis Cells
    Qin, Mohan; Maza, William A.; Stratakes, Bethany M.; Ahrenholtz, Spencer R.; Morris, Amanda J.; He, Zhen (Electrochemical Society, 2016-01-01)
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    Protein-aided formation of triangular silver nanoprisms with enhanced SERS performance
    Geng, Xi; Leng, Weinan; Carter, Nathan A.; Vikesland, Peter J.; Grove, Tijana Z. (Royal Society of Chemistry, 2016-05-10)
    In this work, we present a modified seed-mediated synthetic strategy for the growth of silver nanoprisms with low shape polydispersity, narrow size distribution and tailored plasmonic absorbance. During the seed nucleation step, consensus sequence tetratricopeptide repeat (CTPR) proteins are utilized as potent stabilizers to facilitate the formation of planar-twinned Ag seeds. Ag nanoprisms were produced in high yield in a growth solution containing ascorbic acid and CTPR-stabilized Ag seeds. From the time-course UV-Vis and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) studies, we postulate that the growth mechanism is the combination of facet selective lateral growth and thermodynamically driven Ostwald ripening. The resultant Ag nanotriangles (NTs) exhibit excellent surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) performance. The enhancement factor (EF) measured for the 4-mercapto benzoic acid (4-MBA) reporter is estimated to be 3.37 × 105 in solution and 2.8 × 106 for the SERS substrate.