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"Hydrothermal wrapping" with poly(4-vinylpyridine) introduces functionality: pH-sensitive core-shell carbon nanomaterials

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journal contribution
posted on 2014-09-26, 13:26 authored by Katherine Lawrence, Geoffrey W. Nelson, John S. Foord, Monica Felipe-Sotelo, Nick Evans, John M. Mitchels, Tony D. James, Fengjie Xia, Frank Marken
Negatively charged carbon nanoparticles (surface-phenylsulfonated) are “wrapped” in a poly(4-vinylpyridine) cationomer and hydrothermally converted into a pH-responsive core–shell nano-composite. With a “thin shell” this nano-material (ca. 20–40 nm diameter) is water-insoluble but readily dispersed into ethanol and deposited onto electrodes. Zeta-potential measurements suggest a point of zero charge (PZC) at ca. pH 4.5 with negative functional groups dominating in the more alkaline range and positive functional groups dominating in the acidic range. XPS data suggest carboxylate and pyridinium-like functional groups. This is further confirmed in voltammetric measurements for adsorbed cations (methylene blue) and adsorbed anions (indigo carmine). The specific capacitance reaches a maximum of 13 F g−1 at the PZC explained here tentatively by a “shell charging” effect within the nanoparticle shell.

Funding

K.L. thanks the EPSRC for a DTA studentship to fund this research. This work was also supported by the CSC (China Scholarship Council, file number 2010695033) for F.X.

History

School

  • Science

Department

  • Chemistry

Published in

JOURNAL OF MATERIALS CHEMISTRY A

Volume

1

Issue

14

Pages

4559 - 4564 (6)

Citation

LAWRENCE, K. ... et al, 2013. "Hydrothermal wrapping" with poly(4-vinylpyridine) introduces functionality: pH-sensitive core-shell carbon nanomaterials. Journal of Materials Chemistry A, 1 (14), pp. 4559 - 4564.

Publisher

© Royal Society of Chemistry

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2013

Notes

This article was published in the serial, Journal of Materials Chemistry A [© Royal Society of Chemistry]. The definitive version is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1039/c3ta10198c

ISSN

2050-7488

Language

  • en

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