Development of the carbon nanofibers (CNFs) supported iron catalyst via deposition precipitation method

Abstract

Iron has been used as a catalyst in accelerating ammonia production. However, it easily tends to agglomerate and causes a sintering amongst precursor particles which can decrease their surface area viability. Herein, functionalized CNFs from acid oxidizing treatment was used as a support for an iron catalyst which will act as anchoring sites. The performance of deposition precipitation (DP) method were evaluated using two different amount of iron catalyst precursor loading which were 10 and 50 wt.%. It was found that oxygen-containing group was formed at CNFs surface evidently from RAMAN analysis which enables the deposition of iron catalyst onto the CNFs surface. Congruously, their BET specific surface area was improved accordingly. The TEM and XRF analysis showed that the treated CNFs loaded with iron precursors via DP process obtained a well dispersed of highly loaded iron precursors (>80%) with small crystallites sizes (<5 nm). The observed data signifies that the CNFs are necessary to be oxidized before being used as it can influence the performance of CNFs as a support material. Moreover, the development of CNFs supported iron catalyst via DP method is highly recommended owing to the high dispersion of iron catalyst support features, resulting in a good CNFs performance.