Study On Preparation And Performance Of The WC/Carbon Aerogel Catalyst

Tungsten carbide(WC) has been considerably studied in hydrogenation, dehydrogenation, isomerization and fuel cells because of its Pt-like catalytic activities, excellent stability and resistant inactivation. Hence, it's very meaningful to prepare tungsten carbide or tungsten carbide-containing composites for advanced applications.Carbon aerogels are a novel, low-density, porous, non-crystalline, monolithic nanometer carbon materials. Due to their special network structures, carbon aerogels take on some excellent properties, such as the larger specific surface area, good electric conductivity, and alterable density. Carbon aerogels has been attracted worldwide attentions as a promising material for anode electrode of super capacitors and rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, catalyst supports.In the present work, Na2WO4·2H2O was used as both W precursor and catalyst to synthesize monolithic RF organic aerogels using resorcinol and formaldehyde as starting materials, by means of sol-gel polycondensation process, following solvent exchange and CO2supercritical drying. WC/carbon aerogels were obtained by carbonizing the organic aerogels at a high temperature of1300℃. The analysis technologies including XRD,BET,TEM,FTIR and TG was employed to characterize the micro structure and characteristics of WC/carbon aerogels prepared. Cyclic voltammetry test was used to analyze the electrochemistry catalytic activity.The result shows that WC/carbon aerogels are successfully prepared with a columnar, high surface area and typical WC crystalline structure. In the sol-gel process, catalyst concentration and reactant concentration have significant influence on gelation time, shrink rate and density of W-doped organic aerogels. With the increasing of catalyst concentration and reactant concentration, the gelation time decrease and their volumetric shrinkage and density increase. WC/carbon aerogels show good electrocatalytic reduction activity to p-nitrophenol. Reduction peaks potential and current are (-0.491V,478μA). The electrochemical catalytic to p-nitrophenol of WC/carbon aerogels were better than the carbon aerogels prepared without W-doped. And the W-doped most, the electrocatalytic activity best.