Abstract
Carbon monoxide (CO), being a highly toxic gas, bears hazardous effects on human health and contributes majorly to environmental pollution. It is mostly produced by automobile exhausts and incomplete combustion of carbon-containing substances. Thus, the development of catalysts for CO conversion is highly imperative and has always gained interest for real field applications. Besides the high oxygen storage capacity and facile transitions between oxidation states, the huge abundance of cerium on earth makes CeO2 a low-cost and highly effective alternative to noble metal catalysts for CO oxidation. The present work delineates the room temperature synthesis of flower-shaped 3D CeO2 nanostructures using a sonication-assisted simple synthesis method within 2 hours under the pivotal importance of a structure-directing agent, polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP). The bifunctional contributions of PVP as a surfactant and as a capping agent are discussed with a plausible mechanism. The method leading to the formation of hierarchical CeO2 nanoflowers provides an appreciable surface area of 132.69 cm2 g−1. The morphological and structural characterizations of the catalyst were thoroughly investigated using FESEM, TEM, XRD, UV-visible spectroscopy, photoluminescence spectroscopy, FTIR spectroscopy and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. The structural efficacies of flower-like CeO2 nanostructures have also been correlated to the narrowing of the band gap and the generation of the corresponding oxygen vacancies, resulting in surface catalytic properties towards 80% conversion of CO.
Highlights
The increasing production of carbon monoxide (CO) has become an undeniable part of daily life due to the enormous combustion of fossil fuels, automobile engines and industrial chemical activities.[1]
The XRD crystallographic analysis of the obtained samples showed that the diffraction peaks in Fig. 1 correspond to the (111), (200), (220), (311), (222), (400), (331) and (420) planes, which can be assigned to the face-centered cubic structure for the anatase phase of CeO2
The lattice constant is the side length of the cube, or side length for a hexagonal wurtzite crystal and the bond length is the distance between the nearest atoms, which is different for FCC, BCC or simple cubic crystals, even if they have the same lattice constant
Summary
The increasing production of carbon monoxide (CO) has become an undeniable part of daily life due to the enormous combustion of fossil fuels, automobile engines and industrial chemical activities.[1]. An inherent property that makes the versatile metal-oxide CeO2 even more special is its ability to morph into hierarchical superstructures The creation of such exotic morphological features by tweaking growth parameters o en renders tuned physicochemical properties that can be deployed for speci c applications with respect to the surface area, catalytic properties, etc. In this respect, spherical or two-dimensional structures of CeO2 are perhaps the most widely explored variants of CeO2 nanoparticles. Post-synthesis, the surface catalytic reactivity of CeO2 structures was deployed toward CO conversion, keeping its toxicity in mind
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