Abstract

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Metal nanoparticles are known to possess outstanding mechanical properties, relative to their bulk materials. However, due to large surface energy, nanoparticles tend to coalesce to each other, forming bulk particles and eventually deteriorate in quality. It is therefore, essential to immobilize nanoparticles on a support to help particles stay away from each other. This paper reports the effects of weight fraction on the average crystallite size of ZnO supported groundnut shell based activated carbon composites. Preparation of activated carbon from groundnut shell was carried out by chemical activation process, using ZnCl as activating agent at 2 activation temperature, activation time and impregnation ratio of 600°C, 1.32 hrs and 3 respectively. Surface characterization was carried out on the prepared activated carbon to determine the surface morphology and proximate analysis of the sample. ZnO was synthesized using the sol-gel method with zinc acetate as precur sor salt. The surface morphology and average particle size of synthesized ZnO were determined using scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and transmission electron microscope (TEM) respectively. Groundnut shell activated carbon (GSAC) and ZnO were mixed at different weight percentages (75:25, 50:50 and 25:75) to produce GSAC/ZnO composites. The composites developed were then characterized using X-ray diffrac tion (XRD). Relying on lattice parameters such as diffraction peaks and full width at half maximum (FWHM) obtained from the X-ray powder diffraction, the effects of weight fraction on the average crystallite size of ZnO supported GSAC composites were determined using Scherrer equation. The result obtained showed increase in average crystallite size with decrease in the amount of GSAC present in the GSAC/ZnO compos ite. The GSAC/ZnO composite with 75:25 weight fraction was found to have the smallest average crystallite size of 38.42 nm while GSAC/ZnO composite with 25:75 weight fraction was found to have the largest average crystallite size of 74.42 nm. The results suggest that the stabilization influence of groundnut shell activated carbon on ZnO reduced with increase in the amount of ZnO in the composites.

Keywords: Groundnut Shell, Activated Carbon, X-Ray Diffraction, Crystallite Size, Debye-Scherrer Method