AAAR 33rd Annual Conference
October 20 - October 24, 2014
Rosen Shingle Creek
Orlando, Florida, USA
Abstract View
Collisional Growth Below 2 nm in Flame Aerosol Reactors
JIAXI FANG, Yang Wang, Pai Liu, Pratim Biswas, Washington University in St Louis
Abstract Number: 314 Working Group: Nanoparticles and Materials Synthesis
Abstract The ability to synthesize well controlled multicomponent nanoparticles during combustion synthesis is partially limited by a gap in fundamental knowledge during the initial stages of particle formation below 2 nm. Detailed mechanisms on particle formation and growth in flame aerosol reactors in the sub 2 nm size range is not well established partly due to previous measurement limitations in differential mobility analyzers (DMAs). Experimental evidence on the existence of stable clusters in flame aerosol reactors using high resolution DMAs has only recently been demonstrated [Wang et al., J. Aerosol Sci., 71:52-64]. We will extend this work by examining the detailed kinetics and pathways for particle inception by utilizing a tandem Differential Mobility Analyzer-Mass Spectrometer (DMA-MS) to measure cluster size distributions and their chemical composition for the synthesis of pristine and doped metal oxides. Results have indicated that monomers are rapidly consumed to form larger clusters while larger clusters continue to grow through collisional growth mechanisms. In addition, the synthesis of composite mixed oxides is explored to establish the effect of dopants on particle formation pathways. These results will provide new insight into the particle inception and growth mechanisms in flame aerosol reactors while further enabling combustion synthesis as a scalable method of advanced nanomaterials production.