| Chemical fluid deposition (CFD) is a method of using supercritical fluid (usually carbon dioxide) as a solvent to dissolve metal precursors and then adding a reducing agent to deposit metal nanoparticles or films on a substrate. CFD is considered a green method since it only produces small amount or even none organic or liquid wastes. Using CFD, previous researchers have successfully made films of platinum, palladium, gold, rhodium, cobalt, nickel, and copper; and nanoparticles of platinum, palladium, rhodium, ruthenium, copper, silver and gold. Therefore, it is very interesting to apply CFD in synthesizing other metal nanomaterials.; In this dissertation, the main goals are to use CFD method to synthesize nanomaterials and more importantly to find the applications for them in catalysis or energy storage and related fields. To be more specific, the following topics are investigated: (1) Deposition of platinum nanoparticles on carbon nanotubes by supercritical fluid method; (2) Chemical fluid deposition of well-dispersed iridium nanoparticles on multi-walled carbon nanotubes as recyclable and efficient catalysts for solvent-free hydrogenation reactions; (3) Chemical fluid deposition of Pt-based bimetallic nanoparticles on multi-walled carbon nanotubes for direct methanol fuel cell application. The details of these three studies together with a general introduction will be presented in this dissertation. |
