EUROPEAN CONGRESS AND EXHIBITION ON ADVANCED MATERIALS AND PROCESSES - EUROMAT 2021

The interest in novel carbonaceous materials with large effective surface areas, as well as high conductivity and stability, is growing due to the downsizing of electrical devices and the demand for new low-cost materials. For those applications it is necessary to find materials with high electrical conductivity like it is the case for graphene and nitrogen doped graphene. These nanostructures are of interest for many applications, e.g. batteries, super capacitors, electrodes in electrocatalysis to name a few. Plasma methods provide suitable pathways to obtain high nitrogen doping rates in such materials often in a one step synthesis or by a plasma post-treatment. As there are many possible sites for nitrogen incorporation often a combination of several analytical techniques are needed to relate the incorporation at the different nitrogen sites to the used precursors and processing conditions. Here, it will be shown how a combination of synchrotron x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and near edge x-ray absorption fine structure (NEXAFS) can be used to identify and quantify the different nitrogen species in different plasma grown N-graphene based functional materials including carbon nanowalls and composites with different metal oxides.

The authors acknowledge the support of the PEGASUS (Plasma Enabled and Graphene Allowed Synthesis of Unique Nanostructures) project, funded by the European Union’s Horizon research and innovation program under grant agreement No. 766894. We further thank Helmholtz Zentrum Berlin for the allocation of synchrotron radiation beamtime at BESSY II. Experiments at BESSY have been also supported with H2020 Calypso Plus project, grant Nr. 18207084-ST, 182¬07393-ST and 192-08646-ST.