Carbon Nanotube Materials for Substrate Enhanced Control of Catalytic Activity

Carbon SWNTs are attractive materials for supporting electrocatalysts. The properties of SWNTs are highly tunable and controlled by the nanotube's circumferential periodicity and their surface chemistry. These unique characteristics suggest that architectures constructed from these types of carbon support materials would exhibit interesting and useful properties. Here, we expect that the structure of the carbon nanotube support will play a major role in stabilizing metal electrocatalysts under extreme operating conditions and suppress both catalyst and support degradation. Furthermore, the chemical modification of the carbon nanotube surfaces can be expected to alter the interface between the catalyst and support, thus, enhancing the activity and utilization of the electrocatalysts. We plan to incorporate discrete reaction sites into the carbon nanotube lattice to create intimate electrical contacts with the catalyst particles to increase the metal catalyst activity and utilization. The work involves materials synthesis, design of electrode architectures on the nanoscale, control of the electronic, ionic, and mass fluxes, and use of advanced optical spectroscopy techniques