Study On Controllable Synthesis And Catalytic Performance Of Metal Carbon Composites

Carbon materials and their composites are considered to be the most potential materials and have attracted much attention. In this paper, we use cheap and reproducible saccharides as carbon source and different copper salts as metal source, successfully synthesized a series of Cu@C composites via the one-step and two-step hydrothermal process, and the as-synthesized materials were characterized by XRD, SEM, TEM, TG-DTA, FT-IR and Raman spectra, the influence of synthetic conditions to the Cu@C composites was investigated.In the one-step method, the influence of hydrothermal time and temperature, carbon source, molar ratio of raw materials and copper sources to the morphology, size, BET surface area, copper content and species in the Cu@C composites was investigated. It is found that cupric acetate plays a special role in the formation process of Cu@C composites as revealed by multiple characterization methods, and the formation process of Cu@C composites is also discussed. Li addition, the as-synthesized Cu@C composites was used as sacrificed template to synthesis CuO@SiO2, and CO+-NO reaction was choose to evaluate its catalytic performance.In order to obtain smaller sized Cu@C composites and copper nanoparticles dispersed in it, a novel two-step method is developed, that is, glucose aqueous solution was hydrothermally treated for a certain period of time, then copper salt was added and continue to hydrothermally treated. The results reveal that the reduction ability of the obtained solution is significantly decreased as compare with glucose solution, therefore, smaller sized copper nanoparticles dispersed in the composites could be obtained.