Nitrogenation of carbon surfaces via photoinduced reactions

Abstract

Carbon based materials have emerged in last decades as a promising area of interest in the scientific research. Their wide range of applications goes from the biomedical to the energetic sector thanks to their incredibly large possibilities of being arranged and synthetized in structures with peculiar properties like films, nanoparticles etc. In this regards, the attention of the scientific community is recently focusing on doped carbon material, with thousands of papers published every year. This thesis work focuses on the application of doped carbon materials in the field of energetic applications; in particular, the aim was to synthetize a N-doped carbon film modifying the surface of a standard carbon substrate. The main substrate used was polished glassy carbon (GC), whose use as working electrode is shared among all the electrochemical community. The films were synthetized drop-casting a solution of the doping material (a brominated derivative of phenanthroline) on top of the freshly polished carbon surface and later exposing the deposited organic layer to UV irradiation in order to promote immobilization of the doping material on the GC substrate. Following this protocol, grafting of several organic layers was successfully achieved even for other carbon substrate like amorphous carbon (a-C) and its annealed correspondent. XPS analysis and electrochemical tests were made in order to characterize the films and their catalytic activity towards oxygen reduction in alkaline media (ORR) was tested as well. The organic layer proved to be active also as a chelating agent for metal ions like Fe2+ and Pt2+. Characterization through XPS and ORR activity was tested also for the metal coordinated films.