Exothermic behaviour of aluminium and graphene as a fuel in Fe2O3 based nanothermite

Abstract The main frontier of this research is to study the influence of multi-layer graphene (MLG) and aluminium as a fuel in Al/Fe 2 O 3 and MLG/Fe 2 O 3 nanothermites, fabricated by physical mixing and ultrasonication techniques. To study the structural and energy release properties, prepared samples were characterized by XRD, FESEM, EDS, FTIR, Raman spectroscopy and DSC. The X-ray diffraction (XRD) technique showed that all the phases remain intact during the synthesis. Field emission electron microscopy (FESEM) micrographs displayed the surface morphology of the samples, and besides this, energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS) was used to check the elemental composition of samples. Raman spectroscopy revealed that the ultrasonication waves did not deteriorate the aromatic structure of graphene sheets. Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) spectra were used to observe the information about various functional groups present in the thermite samples. The exothermic energy released by the thermite reaction in both the samples was investigated by differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) and the observed values of energy release for Al/Fe 2 O 3 and MLG/Fe 2 O 3 are 215 J/g and 1640 J/g.