Abstract
It has recently been reported that coal tar pitch (CTP) can be utilised as raw material for the production of graphene nanocapsules (GNCs) because it is formed by a great quantity of aromatic organic compounds (which promote the rearrangement of double bonds by a process of polymerisation). Due to the importance of graphene and the search for a non-expensive methodology to produce it, this work used CTP to synthesise GNCs using an in situ activation technique at low temperatures and evaluating the effect of the working temperature on the formation of such nanostructures. In other words, analysing the form of the particle as the temperature rises from 600 to 900 °C. As result of the experimentation, powders were obtained and analysed by the techniques of X-Ray Diffraction, Raman Spectroscopy and Microscopy, employing Field Emission Scanning Electron Microscopy by normal mode as well as by Scanning Transmission Electron Microscopy and a High-Resolution Scanning Electron Microscopy. The results show that working with temperatures between 800 and 850 °C promotes the production of GNCs, considering that their size reduces as the working temperature rises.
Highlights
Coal tar is a valuable chemical material from which compounds that contain nitrogen are mainly separated, such as indole, carbazole, pyridine and quinoline, more than 500 chemicals have been identified
It has recently been reported that coal tar pitch (CTP) can be utilised as raw material for the production of graphene nanocapsules (GNCs) because it is formed by a great quantity of aromatic organic compounds
Due to the importance of graphene and the search for a non-expensive methodology to produce it, this work used CTP to synthesise GNCs using an in situ activation technique at low temperatures and evaluating the effect of the working temperature on the formation of such nanostructures
Summary
Coal tar is a valuable chemical material from which compounds that contain nitrogen are mainly separated, such as indole, carbazole, pyridine and quinoline, more than 500 chemicals have been identified. Coal tar pitch (CTP) is a material with high aromaticity which is defined as the relation of present carbon in the aromatic compounds with respect to total carbon. The pyrolysis of CTP involves the dehydrogenative polymerisation of the aromatic units, which occurs with the simultaneous distillation of light compounds, leading to the formation of bigger plane macromolecules. The CTP compounds with low molecular weight have an important role in the pyrolysis process because they are eliminated or partially incorporated into the CTPs systems, depending on experimental conditions (Bermejo et al 1995)
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