Ball-milling treatment of cotton fiber for optimizing its derived carbon quantum dots

Abstract

Abstract Due to the physical force of agate balls, many cracks on the surface of cotton fiber are caused by ball-milling treatment. Moreover, ball-milling changes the structure of cotton cellulose from crystalline to amorphous. These factors help increase the contact area of cotton fiber with active water and become more reactive in the hydrothermal process. Finally, ball- milling treatment improves the yield of carbon quantum dots (CQDs), which leads to a 10% increase in the power conversion efficiency of CQDs based quantum dot-sensitized solar cells. Besides, the fluorescence intensity of CQDs is doubled without changing its other characteristics because of the ball-milling treatment. Therefore, ball-milling could be adopted as an effective green method to optimize cotton derived CQDs.