The interactions of arsenic species with platinum and porous carbon electrodes were investigated with an electrochemical quartz crystal microbalance (EQCM) and cyclic voltammetry in alkaline solutions. It is shown that the redox reactions in arsenic-containing solutions, due to arsenic reduction/deposition, oxidation/desorption, and electrocatalyzed oxidation by Pt can be readily distinguished ...

Liquid water is pushed through flow channels of fuel cells, where one surface is a porous carbon electrode made up of carbon fibers. Water drops grow on the fibrous carbon surface in the gas flow channel. The drops adhere to the superficial fiber surfaces but exhibit little penetration into the voids between the fibers. The fibrous surfaces are hydrophobic, but there is a substantial threshold ...

Development of cheap, abundant and metal-free N-doped carbon materials as high efficiency oxygen reduction electrocatalysts is crucial for their practical applications in future fuel cell devices. Here, three-dimensional (3D) N-doped porous carbon (NPC) materials have been successfully developed by a simple template-assisted (e.g., SiO2 spheres) high temperature pyrolysis approach using shrimp-...

Abstract Water pollution and the unsustainable use of fossil fuel derivatives require advanced catalytic methods to clean waters produce fine chemicals from modern biomass. Classical homogeneous catalysts such as sulfuric, phosphoric, hydrochloric acid are highly corrosive non-recyclable, whereas heterogeneous appear promising for lignocellulosic waste depolymerization, pollutant degradation, m...

Electrochemical double-layer capacitors (EDLCs or supercapacitors) are of special potential interest with respect to energy storage. Nearly all EDLCs make use of porous carbons as electrode materials. Further tuning of their performance in EDLC applications requires a better understanding of their properties. In particular, the understanding of the interactions between carbon-based materials an...

An elementary kinetic model is established to represent the coupled behavior of (electro)-chemistry, transport and degradation processes in the porous Ni/YSZ anode of solid oxide fuel cells (SOFC). The model is applied to support the development and evaluation of solid carbon formation mechanisms at Ni/YSZ anodes. The simulations of cells operated on partially reformed hydrocarbons show that pe...

Double diffusive natural convection of carbon dioxide in two-dimensional cavities filled with brine saturated porous media is numerically investigated in this study. Vertical gradients of carbon dioxide concentration and temperature are imposed across the height of the cavity. The objective is to understand the dissolution of carbon dioxide through natural convection process over long period of...

Successive treatment of cyanuric chloride with two aromatic diamines, at least one of them sulfonated, yields water-soluble sulfonated azacalix[4]arenes which may be isolated by crystallisation. Functionalised azacalixarenes may be made by first displacing two chloro substituents from the cyclisation precursor. Attempted formation of an azacalix[6]arene led to a dimeric species for which two st...

Single-walled carbon nanotube bundles dispersed in a highly polar fluid are found to agglomerate into a porous structure when exposed to low levels of laser radiation. The phototunable nanoscale porous structures provide an unusual way to control the acoustic properties of the suspension. Despite the high sound speed of the nanotubes, the measured speed of longitudinal-acoustic waves in the sus...

Hybrid inorganic/organic adsorbents were synthesized using mixtures of diatomite and carbon charcoal as precursors, and explored for the removal of p-cresol from aqueous solution. The carbon/diatomite composites displayed a bimodal and interconnected porous structure which was partially inherited from both precursors. They display moderate surface areas (between 100 and 400 m(2)g(-1)) due to th...