Carbon-encapsulated metal nanoparticles were synthesized by thermal treatment of wood char, with or without transition metal ions pre-impregnated, at 900°C to 1,100°C. Nanoparticles with concentric multilayer shells were observed. The nanoparticles were analyzed by scanning electron microscopy, transmission electron microscopy (TEM), X-ray diffraction (XRD), and energy dispersive X-ray (EDX) spectroscopy. The EDX spectrum showed that carbon was the dominant element in the shells. TEM and XRD analysis indicated that the generated carbon shells had structures similar to that of graphite with an average interplanar distance of 0.34 nm. The effects of temperature and pre-impregnation of metal ions on the yield of carbon-encapsulated metal nanoparticles were studied.
Contributor Notes
The authors are, respectively, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Faculty of Forestry, Univ. of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada (yicheng.du@utoronto.ca); Associate Professor, Dept. of Physics and Astronomy (cw175@msstate.edu), and Associate Professor, Dave C. Swalm School of Chemical Engineering (hossein@che.msstate.edu), Mississippi State Univ., Starkville; Project Leader, USDA Forest Serv., Forest Products Lab., Madison, Wisconsin (zcai@fs.fed.us); and Graduate Student, Dept. of Mathematics and Statistics (xl6@msstate.edu), Professor, Dept. of Forest Products (jzhang@cfr.msstate.edu), and Postdoctoral Research Associate, Ag & Bio Engineering (qy8@ra.msstate.edu), Mississippi State Univ., Starkville. Approved for publication as Journal Article no. FP574 of the Forest and Wildlife Research Center, Mississippi State University. This paper was received for publication in September 2010. Article no. 10-00041.