Enhanced preconcentration of selected chlorofluorocarbons on multiwalled carbon nanotubes with polar functionalities
Chutarat Saridara1, Chaudhery Mustansar Hussain, Smruti Ragunath
1Department of Chemistry and Environmental Science, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ, USA; Faculty of Science and Technology, Department of Chemistry, Rajamangala University of Technology, Thanyaburi, Thailand.
Abstract:
Chromatographic monitoring of chlorofluorocarbons in air requires the preconcentration of these highly volatile species. In this paper, we present functionalized multiwalled carbon nanotubes as effective sorbents for a microtrap designed for chlorofluorocarbons preconcentration. Among the commercial carbons and carbon nanotubes studied, functionalization via carboxylation and propyl amine was most effective for dichlorofluoromethane and trichlorofluoromethane (Freon 11), which were selected as representative chlorofluorocarbons. The results show that carbon nanotubes functionalized with a polar groups led to as much as a 300% increase in breakthrough volume and the desorption bandwidth was reduced by 2.5 times.
