Carbon Materials for Hydrogen Storage and Polymeric Membrane Modification
There are many carbon materials with characteristics and properties that have a substantial impact on many fields of application, technologies for energy storage, the manufacture of electronic devices, in the development of technologies for virus detection and elimination of bacteria, among others. In this work, we cover two application areas: hydrogen storage and PVDF modification using carbon materials.
Hydrogen has a high energy density three times higher than gasoline; it is also eco-friendly and renewable. For developing a hydrogen-based economy, some challenges related to hydrogen production, storage, and distribution must be overcome. The most suitable method of storing hydrogen is solid-state storage, which consists of hydrogen adsorption on a material's surface. Carbon materials stand out because they have attractive properties for storage; in particular, graphene oxide has a high specific surface, has a very low density, and its functional groups facilitate the formation of composite materials with favorable properties for hydrogen storage. Motivated by this, we employ the framework of the density functional theory to investigate the adsorption of hydrogen on the surface of graphene oxide decorated with titanium. The calculated adsorption energies indicate that this material can reach a high storage capacity at ambient conditions.
PVDF is a semi-crystalline organic polymer with five phases; three of them present electroactive properties (pyro piezo and ferroelectricity). The beta phase, in particular, has the best electroactive properties. Therefore, a higher percentage of beta phase is desired by applications such as the development of nanogenerators and the manufacture of particulate filters, among others. One way to increase the amount of beta phase in PVDF is through the electrospinning technique, which it is possible to manufacture PVDF membranes with a greater amount of beta phase. Another way to enhance the beta phase in PVDF is by incorporating a reinforcing phase. In this sense, we combine these two strategies to produce PVDF electrospun membranes modified with carbon materials. We study the effects of carbon materials on PVDF properties using various characterization techniques X-ray diffraction, Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy, Scanning electron microscopy, Raman spectroscopy, and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy.