Abstract
High-porosity monolithic composite aerogels of syndiotactic polystyrene (sPS) and poly(2,6-dimethyl-1,4-phenylene oxide) (PPO) containing reduced graphene oxide (r-GO) were prepared and characterized. The composite aerogels obtained by supercritical carbon dioxide (scCO2) extraction of sPS/r-GO and PPO/r-GO gels were characterized by a fibrillar morphology, which ensured good handling properties. The polymer nanoporous crystalline phases obtained within the aerogels led to high surface areas with values up to 440 m2 g−1. The role of r-GO in aerogels was studied in terms of catalytic activity by exploring the oxidation capacity of composite PPO and sPS aerogels toward benzyl alcohol in diluted aqueous solutions. The results showed that, unlike sPS/r-GO aerogels, PPO/r-GO aerogels were capable of absorbing benzyl alcohol from the diluted solutions, and that oxidation of c.a. 50% of the sorbed benzyl alcohol molecules into benzoic acid occurred.
Highlights
Since the first examples of synthetic polymer aerogels reported by Pekala and co-workers [1,2,3], many types of polymer aerogels have been synthetized by changing the sol-gel process and the polymer backbone [4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12]
The oxidized graphite (GO) formation was confirmed by an increase in the distance between the layers from 0.34 nm up to 0.84 nm, while the d-spacing corresponding to the in-plane periodicities of 100 planes remained intact
Another notable difference was in the full-width at half maxima (FWHM) of the reduced graphene oxide (r-Graphene oxide (GO)), which increased compared with that of pristine graphite (G), confirming the formation of the disordered graphitic structure after oxidation followed by solvothermal reduction treatments
Summary
Since the first examples of synthetic polymer aerogels reported by Pekala and co-workers [1,2,3], many types of polymer aerogels have been synthetized by changing the sol-gel process and the polymer backbone [4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12]. The nanoporous crystalline phases of sPS and PPO are able to sorb volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from water and vapour phase even at low activities [28,29,30,31,32,33]. SPS and PPO nanoporous crystalline aerogels are interesting for potential use in air and water purification devices. In addition to this possible use, applications in microelectronics [34] and for the removal of airborne nanoparticles [35,36] have been proposed for sPS aerogels
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