THE FRAGMENTED STRUCTURE OF COPPER IN TEMPERATURE FIELDS

The metallic materials with developed surface and special physicochemical properties are increasingly used as the catalysts in chemical, oil refining industry, and water treatment systems. In particular, copper catalysts are used to synthesize aniline. However, many chemical processes occur at the increased temperatures that cannot but affect the service life of catalysts, which are produced by different technological methods. Therefore, it is important to study the influence of the procedure for producing copper electrolytic catalyst materials on their behavioral features in temperature fields.

In this paper, in the temperature fields, the authors study copper electrolytic foils with the developed surface produced using the mechanical cathode activation and without it. The paper presents the results of the study of changes in their surface morphology and phase composition in the process of their heat treatment in the oxidizing medium as well as the study of the dependence of stored elastic energy on the concentration in the crystals materials containing the high-energy defects of growth origin.

During the experiments, the differences in enthalpy change (during heating process) for two subsequent phase transformations in copper foils were detected. These differences can prove that, except the intensive copper oxidation at the assigned temperatures in both foils, in the foils grown using the mechanical cathode activation, the relaxation processes associated with the existence of the high concentration of crystalline structure defects having the growth origin take place. This allows speaking that foils consisting of pentagonal pyramids and cone crystals with the developed surface have the greater elastic energy accumulated in the electrodeposition process than the foils produced without applying the mechanical cathode activation.