Nicholas Brunelli publishes in nature communications
Nicholas A. Brunelli began teaching at the William G. Lowrie Department of Chemical and Molecular Engineering in January, 2014. In February, one of the papers he had been working on was published in Nature Communications – one of the most prestigious and visible scientific publications in the world.
The paper discusses ways of improving single-walled nanotubes (SWNTs), which are important ‘building block’ materials for nanoscale science and technology. Synthetic single-walled carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are the most well-known SWNTs, but have certain limitations. In the paper “Direct synthesis of single-walled aminoaluminosilicate nanotubes with enhanced molecular adsorption selectivity,” Brunelli and other researchers describe a potential synthesis route that would dramatically improve nanotube functionality through incorporating functional groups uniformly inside 1nm pores doubling the CO2 adsorption selectivity. Functionalizing the internal volume of nanotubes opens up a whole new dimension to tuning the properties of nanotubes. Read the complete article as it appears on Nature.com.
Brunelli, who graduated from The Ohio State University William G. Lowrie Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering with honors in 2004 with an NSF Graduate Fellowship, earned his Ph.D. in 2009 with K.P. Giapis and R.C. Flagan at the California Institute of Technology. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Georgia Institute of Technology prior to joining Ohio State. For more about Brunelli, see p.4, "Focus on Faculty," in CBE's Fall 2013 Koffolt News.
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Dun-Yen Kang, Nicholas A. Brunelli, G. Ipek Yucelen, Anandram Venkatasubramanian, Ji Zan, Johannes Leisen, Peter J. Hesketh, Christopher W. Jones, and Sankar Nair.
Nature Communications 5, Article number: 3342, doi: 10.1038/ncomms4342. Published 17 February 2014.
Abstract
Internal functionalization of single-walled nanotubes is an attractive, yet difficult challenge in nanotube materials chemistry. Here we report single-walled metal oxide nanotubes with covalently bonded primary amine moieties on their inner wall, synthesized through a one-step approach. Conclusive molecular-level structural information on the amine-functionalized nanotubes is obtained through multiple solid-state techniques. The amine-functionalized nanotubes maintain a high carbon dioxide adsorption capacity while significantly suppressing the adsorption of methane and nitrogen, thereby leading to a large enhancement in adsorption selectivity over unfunctionalized nanotubes (up to four-fold for carbon dioxide/methane and ten-fold for carbon dioxide/nitrogen). The successful synthesis of single-walled nanotubes with functional, covalently-bound organic moieties may open up possibilities for new nanotube-based applications that are currently inaccessible to carbon nanotubes and other related materials.
