International Journal of Innovation and Applied Studies ISSN 2028-9324 Vol. 3 No. 1 May 2013, pp. 1-5 © 2013 Innovative Space of Scientific Research Journals http://www.issr-journals.org/ijias/ Corresponding Author: V.Himabindu (drvhimabindu@gmail.com) 1 Flame Synthesis of Carbon Nanorods with / without catalyst M. Venkateswer Rao 1 , K. Amareshwari 1 , V. Viditha 1 , C. Mahender 1 , V Himabindu 1 , and Y Anjaneyulu 2 1 Center for Environment, Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University Hyderabad, Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh, India 2 Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Jackson State University, Jackson, Mississippi, United States Copyright © 2013 ISSR Journals. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. ABSTRACT: The carbon nanorods (CNR’s) were synthesized using flame reactor with diffusion burner. The growth of carbon nanorods in presence and absence of catalyst has been studied. The role of ferrocene as catalyst in the synthesis of carbon nanorods was investigated using a Flame Reactor at different oxygen to fuel ratios. The fuel used over here is acetylene. The fuel i.e., acetylene to oxygen ratio is also optimized to produce the carbon nanorods in presence of cataylst. The carbon nanorods showed a very good result with increasing yield and decreasing diameter with the use of catalyst. The morphology, purity and crystal structural characterization of CNR’s was carried out using scanning electron microscopy, transmission electron microscopy and X-ray diffraction. From the analysis it was observed that in the presence of ferrocene, the density of CNR’s increased with variable lengths between 10 – 50 micrometers (µm) with an average tube diameter range of 150 – 300 nanometers (nm), when compared to a non-catalytic synthesis which yielded CNR’s with lengths and diameter ranging from 10 -180 micrometers (μm) and 3-10 micrometers (μm) respectively. These carbon nanorods can be widely used in various applications such as electronic devices, semi-conducting materials, electrodes, hydrogen storage and composites for its outstanding properties. KEYWORDS: Flame synthesis, Nanomaterials, Acetylene, Ferrocene. 1 INTRODUCTION Carbon nanomaterials have attracted great interest from past few decades owing to their promising physical and chemical properties. Till date different carbon nanomaterials have been reported such as carbon nanoparticles [1], nanotubes [2], onions [3], nanowires [4], nanofibers [5] and carbon nanorods [6]. These nano meter carbon material are expected to have relatively large band gap and are expected to behave like a semiconductor. More interestingly carbon nano rods have been largely applied as anodic materials in batteries apart from their applications like fillers [7] and high- performance electrode materials in batteries [8]. Upto now, various methods have been proposed for thier synthesis like ball milling [9, 10] chemical vapor deposition [11], laser ablation, chemical reduction and co-precipitation [12-15]. More recently, new synthetic methods like flame synthesis, sol-gel, microwave plasma and low energy cluster beam deposition [16] have been developed. We have earlier reported the synthesis of carbon nanorods using the flame reactor. Here in this article we report the synthesis of carbon nanorods using a diffusion burner with acetylene as a sole carbon source and oxygen as an oxidant in the presence of catalyst, ferrocene. We have aimed to study the difference between the growth of CNM’s with and without catalyst with respect to the (oxidant to fuel) O/F ratio in the range of 0.6 – 1.2 v/v. The samples were characterized using SEM, TEM and XRD.