Hi, I have exfoliated a mixture of graphite, pluronic f127, and water via Silverson shear mixer and after that I wanted to characterize the results via TGA. I want to show that after hours of exfoliation, Graphene exists in the precipitate and this can be illustrated in the TGA results where the weight percentage decrease clearly compared to the TGA results of graphite (the weight percentage barely decreases). My question is, after 4 hours of exfoliation, the weight percentage shows a small decrease from 100% to 97%. Any suggestions on what to do? I need the weight % of graphene (product of exfoliation) to clearly decrease in the TGA characterization.
Note that I used Nitrogen N2 in my TGA characterization. Should I use air flow instead of nitrogen flow? Thank you.
If you use air instead of N2 while performing thermal analysis, your material Will get thermally decomposed (oxidised). And I think you will get much reliable results from such TGA curve.
Lateef Ahmad Malik thank you so much for your answer. My goal is to get the T1/2 which is the temperature at which the material loses half of its weight. So yes probably I should use air flow in order to get such result since N2 gas flow didn't provide such curve since the weight slightly decreased.
Inert gas (e.g. N2) is usually used for kinetic study (e.g activation energy calculation). In this atmosphere the combustion is not complete and at the end of the thermal degradation there is the uncombusted material together with the ash of the combusted material.
So, to have the weight loss of the combusted or uncombusted material you should perform the analysis under O2 (or air) atmosphere.
By the way, F127 and graphite onset temperature are Ca. 400 oC and 700 oC, respectively. So, do not go beyond 600 oC!
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