Morphology Change and Structural Evaluation of Carbon Nanostructures

In this study, the change of porosity and roughness of carbon nanostructures, including fullerenes, carbon nanotubes and graphene was investigated according to oxidation process. The effect of oxidation was more sensible on smoother surface of nanostructures. Oxidation increases surface roughness of graphene up to 5.2% and porosity up to 35.2%. While, roughness of hummers graphene is 13.1% higher than pure graphene. According to AFM results, oxidation can increase porosity and roughness of the surface. The amount of this increase is clearly a function of surface smoothness and multi-dimensional geometry of nanostructure. The functionalization processes have a positive effect on reducing the clustering phenomenon of nanoparticles and reduction of nanostructure particle size in their clusters that causes increases in surface porosity and roughness. So, functionalization processes can strongly change morphology of the nanoparticles in terms of structure, surface properties and geometry and according to these changes, nanostructures shows different behaviors.