Hierarchically Porous Graphitic Carbon with Simultaneously High Surface Area and Colossal Pore Volume Engineered via Ice Templating.

Developing hierarchical porous carbon (HPC) materials with competing textural characteristics such as surface area and pore volume in one material is difficult to accomplish, particularly for an atomically ordered graphitic carbon. Herein we describe a synthesis strategy to engineer tunable HPC materials across micro-, meso-, and macroporous length scales, allowing the fabrication of a graphitic HPC material (HPC-G) with both very high surface area (>2500 m/g) and pore volume (>11 cm/g), the combination of which has not been attained previously. The mesopore volume alone for these materials is up to 7.

Tunable Oxygen Functional Groups as Electrocatalysts on Graphite Felt Surfaces for All-Vanadium Flow Batteries.

A dual oxidative approach using O2 plasma followed by treatment with H2 O2 to impart oxygen functional groups onto the surface of a graphite felt electrode. When used as electrodes for an all-vanadium redox flow battery (VRB) system, the energy efficiency of the cell is enhanced by 8.2 % at a current density of 150 mA cm(-2) compared with one oxidized by thermal treatment in air.

Instability of hydrogenated TiO2.

Hydrogenated TiO2 (H-TiO2) is touted as a viable visible light photocatalyst. We report a systematic study on the thermal stability of H-implanted TiO2 using nuclear reaction analysis (NRA), Rutherford backscattering spectrometry, ultraviolet photoelectron spectroscopy, and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. Protons (40 keV) implanted at a ∼2 atom % level within a ∼120 nm wide profile of rutile TiO2(110) were situated ∼300 nm below the surface.