EXPERIMENTS ON SURFACE REACTION OF NO2, O2 WITH METALLIC Zn NANOSTRUCTURES FABRICATED VIA AEROSOL ROUTE

Nitric Oxide (NO) and Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2) are particularly harmful gaseous pollutants in urban and industrial areas, owing to the large use of thermal engines and power plants. In the case of engine exhausts, in spite of the fact that NO2 is a minority gas pollutant species, it does yield the major damage to vegetation and living beings because of the fact that NO2 reacts in the troposphere and forms acid rains. The decomposition rate of the nitrogen oxides is relatively low, thus it is necessary to use noble metals (Rh, Pd, Co, etc.) to catalyze this process (DeNOx process). Nanostructured metallic Zn and ZnO could be retained as catalyst candidates to the reduction of NO2 in the future (Shimokawabe et al., 1997). This study reports some IR-Spectroscopy results about the surface chemistry of nanostructured Zn/ZnO fabricated by evaporation/condensation routes and preventively characterized by SEM/TEM and XRD.