THE SYNTHESIS OF ENCAPSULATED ONION-LIKE FULLERENES FROM WASHING COAL

摘要

Since Ugart's discovery in 1992[1], Onion-like fullerenes (OLFs) have attracted much attention across the world because of their unique structure, physical properties[2] and many potential applications in a number of fields such as nanoball bearings, nanoelectronic-magnetic devices, gas storage, and biotechnology [3-6], Hollow OLFs, solid OLFs and encapsulated OLFs, while differ in their centric structures, have been produced by arc discharge[7], radio frequency plasma[8] and electron irradiation[9]. Compared with other methods, radio frequency plasma method is simple, cheap and easy to implement, and has been used in OLFs' preparation. In the past decade, research on exploring for preparation of OLFs has been very active in the hopes of developing a material that could produce cheap OLFs with high quality. Thus, if an easily available carbon source could be found, OLFs would be produced in a more economical way. For this purpose, coal seems to be a good candidate because it is one of the cheap and abundant carbon sources in nature. Here we report the preparation of encapsulated OLFs from a kind of washing coal by radio frequency plasma method.