AN OLD BUT NEW NANOMATERIAL: EXPLOITING CARBON BLACK FOR SYNTHESIS OF ADVANCED MATERIALS

Carbon black (CB) is an old-concept but versatile carbonaceous material prone to be structurally and chemically modified in quite mild wet conditions. Recently, in our group, the potentiality of CB has been exploited for the production of a highly varied array of advanced materials with applications in energetics, water remediation and sensoristic. The proposed approach intersects and face the continuous need of low cost and scalable methods for easily tune relevant chemico-physical properties of carbon-based materials. Two approaches have been exploited: 1) modification of CB at the surface; 2) highly CB destructuration. The former approach allows obtaining highly homogenous CB-modified nanoparticles (around 160 nm) with tunable surface properties (hydrophilicity, type and surface charge density, pore size distribution), supports for ionic liquid (SILP) and composites (carbon-magnetite). The latter approach exploits a top-down demolition of CB for producing highly versatile graphene related material (GRM), made up by stacked short graphene layers (GL) particularly suitable for advanced composites synthesis and ultrathin carbon-based films.