Characteristics of Nanocarbon Pyrolyzed from Coconut Shell

In this work, coconut shell was used as raw material to. Dried coconut shells were burned in a close compartment to form coconut charcoal. The dried carbon was further washed with hot distilled water to obtain a pH 7 and was dried again in an oven at 100 °C for 12 hours. The carbon was further pyrolyzed at two temperature variations, i.e. at 400 °C and 1400 °C, under argon environment for two hours before being cooled to room temperature and ready for characterization. The X-ray diffraction result showed that there are two prominent peaks centred around 2θ 25° and 43°, whereas the scanning electron microscopy result showed the flakes microstructure with long range size variation. The energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy showed that the composition of sample pyrolyzed at 400° C has 59-85 % carbon 7-37 % oxygen and 0.02-0.93 other elements (Si, P, Cl, K, Ti and Ni), whereas the sample pyrolyzed at 1400 °C has 88-92 % carbon, 7.8-11.7 % oxygen and 0.01-0.4 % other elements. This result showed that the coconut shell has the potential to be used as a cheap raw material for synthesizing nanocarbon using a simple method.