Doping of Palladium in Silica Nanofibers via Electrospinning and Sol-Gel Synthesize as Hydrogen Storage Material

Abstract

In recent years, one dimensional nanostructure, nanowires, nanofibers with unique properties have been a subject of intense research due to reduction of devise dimension, potential properties from the re-arrangement at the molecular level and high surface area. There are many methods for synthesize such as laser ablation, chemical vapour deposition, solution method micro pulling down method but all these method faced to the major disadvantages of being complicated with long wasting time and relatively high expense . The electrospinning recently used for producing ceramic, metal, and carbon nanofibers. In this report, we incorporate palladium into silica nanofibers for the first time, and the effect of doping of palladium into the silica nanofibers is investigated. The different ratio of palladium to silica and comparing with silica nanofibers is also reported. The composition, morphology, structure and surface area of silica, and silica palladium nanofibers were investigated by thermo gravimetric analysis (TGA), x-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM),Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR), and Micromeriics. To the best of our knowledge, investigation on characteristic on Silica palladium nanofibers has not been reported up to now. The result reveal that the silica nanofibers compare to silica doped with palladium have lower diameter, and also by increasing the temperature above 600 °C, the reduction in length of nanofibers happened. High surface area of silica palladium nanofibers can be one of the promising materials for hydrogen storage.