A process for controlling the size of Single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) sorting was achieved by combining various centrifugation speeds with polypyrimidine’s properties of dispersion and release SWCNTs upon acid treatment. At first, the SWCNTs wrapped by polypyrimidine were sperated into different size by centrifugating at various speeds. Then, these size-selected hybrids were treated with H 2 SO 4 (98 %) to release free SWCNTs from hybrids, meanwhile the copolymer was collected for reuse. The purity of the released size-controlled SWCNTs was found to be higher than the commercial SWCNTs. The simple synthetic procedure of the copolymer, the low cost of H 2 SO 4 and low centrifugation speed allow the process of size-controlled SWCNTs sorting to more practical applications and industrial scaling up.
In this paper, we mainly studied the preparation of platinum-containing composite materials with carbon nanotubes wrapped by polypyrimidine-conjugated polymers and the performance of the composites. The polymer-based carbon nanotubes/Pt catalysts were prepared successfully and confirmed by infrared spectroscopy, XPS, XRD, and TEM images. The performance of polypyrimidine/multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs)/Pt and polypyrimidine/double-walled carbon nanotubes (DWCNTs)/Pt was compared with the polypyrimidine/single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs)/Pt. The amount of the loaded Pt on the polypyrimidine/MWCNTs and polypyrimidine/DWCNTs was calculated to be 50.5 wt% and 52.7 wt% respectively. The effective specific surface area of the polypyrimidine/MWCNTs/Pt (45.7 m 2 /g) and polypyrimidine/DWCNTs/Pt (42.47 m 2 /g) was observed by electrochemical cyclic voltammetry. These studies strongly imply that the MWCNTs were better candidates than DWCNTs and SWCNTs in the application of polypyrimidine/CNT materials as catalyst for fuel cells.