Fine-tuning the catalytic cracking-assisted synthesis of plastic-derived MWCNTs-supported metal oxides for methanol electrooxidation

Abstract

• High performance MWCNTs-supported metal oxides have been successfully synthesized using plastics. • The combination between catalytic cracking process and catalytic chemical vapor deposition (CCVD) allows improving the efficiency of MWCNTs-supported metal oxides. • The FER zeolite is the efficient catalyst for catalytic cracking process, eventually enhancing the quality of MWCNTs-supported metal oxides. • MWCNTs-supported metal oxides exhibit outstanding properties in methanol electrooxidation. Multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) have been successfully fabricated using waste plastics via the two-stage process combining between catalytic cracking with the aid of an acid zeolite, and chemical vapor deposition (CVD) using transition metals supported on zeolites as catalysts. By fine-tuning the catalytic cracking process with an appropriate zeolite, the small carbon intermediates can be produced from starting plastics. Subsequently, transition metals supported on zeolites were used as catalytic templates in the CVD process to efficiently produce uniform structured and high qualified MWCNTs with a very high yield (96%) from cracked products. Interestingly, the fabricated materials exhibit the significantly improved electrocatalytic oxidation of methanol up to 8 to 14-fold advantage with respect to the one obtained by a traditional synthesis. These findings open up new opportunities to fine-tune the performance of synthesized CNTs from plastics in an electrocatalysis. The high performance CNTs-supported metals have been successfully fabricated using the catalytic cracking-assisted synthesis of waste plastics by two-stage process. By fine-tuning the appropriate catalytic cracking catalyst in the first stage to produce the facile hydrocarbons for the transformation towards CNTs in the second stage, the high performance CNTs has been obtained with the outstanding electrochemical properties for methanol electrooxidation.