Detonation-assisted self-assembly synthesis of carbon onions using organics with long carbon chain

The detonation of mixtures of organics with long carbon chains and explosives has been found to yield carbon onions without use of any catalyst. Octadecanoic acid, hexadecylic acid, behenic acid and CTAB (cetyltrimethylammonium bromide) have been used as raw materials. The recovered products were characterized using various techniques such as scanning electron microscope, transmission electron microscope, Raman spectroscopy, infrared spectroscopy and X-ray diffraction. The prepared carbon onions consist of concentric-shell graphitic layers with a narrow size distribution of 60 to 70 nm, which aggregated to form a chain-like structure. Formation mechanism of the carbon onions was proposed as that the organics with long chains broke their functional groups and self-assembled into carbon onions due to low free energy.