Effect of High Ammonium Salt Concentration and Temperature on the Structure, Morphology, and Ionic Conductivity of Proton-Conductor Solid Polymer Electrolytes Based PVA.

Polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) based proton-conducting solid polymer electrolyte was prepared with a high salt concentration of ammonium nitrate (NH4NO3) by the technique of solvent casting. From the X-ray diffraction studies, the semicrystalline nature of PVA with the inclusion of NH4NO3 was studied. XRD analysis indicates that the highest ion conductive sample exhibits the minimum crystalline nature. The decreasing trend of Jonscher-exponent with temperature rise reveals that the present system is insured by the correlated barrier hopping (CBH) model. The maximum room temperature conductivity was found to be 5.17 × 10-5 S/cm for PVA loaded 30 wt.% of NH4NO3. The ionic transport of the proton-conducting solid polymer electrolyte was studied at the temperature range of 303-353 K. The conductivity-temperature relationship of the systems was analyzed using both the Arrhenius and Vogel-Tammann-Fulcher (VTF) models to explain the ionic hopping mechanism for the system.

Atmospheric Pressure Catalytic Vapor Deposition of Graphene on Liquid Sn and Cu-Sn Alloy Substrates.

The chemical vapor deposition (CVD) of graphene on liquid substrates produces high quality graphene films due to the defect-free and atomically flat surfaces of the liquids. Through the detailed study of graphene growth on liquid Sn using atmospheric pressure CVD (APCVD), the quality of graphene has been found to have a close relationship with hydrogen flow rate that reflects on hydrogen partial pressure inside the reactor (PH2) and hydrogen solubility of the growth substrates. The role of PH2 was found to be crucial, with a low defect density monolayer graphene being obtained in low PH2 (90.4 mbar), while partial graphene coverage occurred at high PH2 (137.3 mbar). To further understand the role of substrate's composition, binary alloy with compositions of 20, 30, 50, 60 and 80 wt.% tin in copper were made by arc-melting. Graphene quality was found to decrease with increasing the content of copper in the Cu-Sn alloys when grown using the conditions optimised for Sn substrates and this was related to the change in hydrogen solubility and the high catalytic activity of Cu compared to Sn. This shall provide a tool to help optimising CVD conditions for graphene growth based on the properties of the used catalytic substrate.