Porous carbon materials have attracted growing attention among the different types of supports used in heterogeneous catalysis because of certain favorable characteristics, which are essentially their resistance to acidic/basic media, significant pore and surface tailorability, and ease of recovery of catalytic metals via combustion of the support material. Carbon fibers typically feature a rel...

Sodium borohydride (NaBH4) hydrogen storage systems offer many advantages for hydrogen storage applications. The physical processes nside a NaBH4 packed bed reactor involve multi-component and multi-phase flow and multi-mode heat and mass transfer. These processes are lso coupled with reaction kinetics. To guide reactor design and optimization, a reactor model involving all of these processes i...

The high cost and scarcity of noble metal catalysts, such as Pt, have hindered the hydrogen production from electrochemical water splitting, the oxygen reduction in fuel cells and batteries. Herein, we developed a simple template-free approach to three-dimensional porous carbon networks codoped with nitrogen and phosphorus by pyrolysis of a supermolecular aggregate of self-assembled melamine, p...

Homogeneous poly(vinyl alcohol) (PVA)–silica gel polymer hybrids were prepared by in-situ hydrolysis of poly(vinyl acetate) (PVAc) in a sol– gel reaction mixture with tetramethoxysilane (TMOS). The degree of hydrolysis was evaluated by FTIR and C CP/MAS NMR; it increased with an increase in the acid catalyst and reached 85% with 1.6 ml of 0.1 M HCl. The homogeneity of the polymer hybrids obtain...

The hydrolysis of sodium borohydride as a source of hydrogen gas is studied at different mole ratios of H+ to NaBH4. The sulfonated porous carbon (SPC) is used as a source of hydrogen ion and catalyst. It is found that the sulfonated porous carbon exhibits high activity for the hydrolysis of NaBH4 to generate hydrogen gas at room temperature in comparison to Amberlyst-15 and Nafion-NR50. The ki...

We employ a combination of Z-contrast scanning transmission electron microscopy (ZSTEM) and first-principles density-functional calculations to investigate the interaction between metal atoms and cubic alumina catalytic supports. We show that there are two observed La sites at the porous γalumina surface, and that single La atoms do not exhibit a tendency to cluster. Cr behaves very differently...

The rationalisation of the influence of acidity and pore size of several solid oxides so that they selectively act as supports for preparation of encapsulated porphyrin hybrid materials or as catalysts for synthesis of porphyrins in solution is discussed. Encapsulated porphyrin yields are dependent on both the acidity and the material pore size, Al-MCM-41 being the best fitting solid, with Lewi...

Highly sensitive H2 gas sensors were prepared using pure and Pt-loaded SnO2 nanoparticles. Thick film sensors (~35 μm) were fabricated that showed a highly porous interconnected structure made of high density small grained nanoparticles. Using Pt as catalyst improved sensor response and reduced the operating temperature for achieving high sensitivity because of the negative temperature coeffici...

Constructing atomically dispersed platinum (Pt) electrocatalysts is essential to build high-performance and cost-effective electrochemical water-splitting systems. We present a novel strategy to realize the traction and stabilization of isolated Pt atoms in the nitrogen-containing porous carbon matrix (Pt@PCM). In comparison with the commercial Pt/C catalyst (20 weight %), the as-prepared Pt@PC...

β-FeOOH nanorod (NR) catalysts prepared by ultrasonic-irradiated chemical synthesis enabled lithium-air cells to have high round-trip efficiency and extremely low overpotential as well as an outstanding rate capability. Good catalytic activities of the β-FeOOH NR bundle could be ascribed to its crystal structure, which consists of 2 × 2 tunnels formed by edge- and corner-sharing Fe(O,OH)6 octah...