Carbon nanomaterials have been widely used in the field of material science, power conversion, nanotechnology, and environmental technology due to their unique physical and chemical properties. Carbon can exist in various forms as amorphous carbon, graphite, diamond, buckminsterfullerene (C60), carbon nanotube (CNT), and graphene depending on how the carbon atoms are arranged. Due to their superior optical, electrical, mechanical, and thermal properties, they are utilized in wide range of applications, including optoelectronic device, electronic device, electrochemical capacitor, drug delivery, sensor, catalyst, adsorbent etc. To enhance the performance of these applications, tailoring the properties of carbon nanomaterials by modifying their molecular structure is important. For this reason, various chemical synthetic routes have been developed to modify carbon nanomaterials, however, they suffer from complicated, time-consuming, and high cost process to limit the commercialization of final products.
In this study, carbon nanomaterials were fabricated and their properties were tuned by novel electron beam irradiation for the application of improvement in photoelectrochemical (PEC) cells and adsorbents to remove environmental pollutants. According to this study, the electronic band structure of PCBM was tuned based on electron irradiation by controlling the electron fluence. As a result, the performance of the PEC cell using electron-irradiated PCBM was maximized at an optimum electron irradiation condition. On the other hand, nanostructured carbon adsorbents were fabricated by electron irradiation and post-heating of nanostructured polystyrene. The fabricated nanostructured carbon adsorbent efficiently removed organic pollutants from water. Based on these studies, we suggest that novel electron beam irradiation technique can be a good tool to fabricate and control properties of carbon nanomaterials for various applications.