AAAR 34th Annual Conference
October 12 - October 16, 2015
Hyatt Regency
Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
Abstract View
Establishing the Relationship between Precursor Feed Rate and Materials Composition during the Combustion Aerosol Synthesis of Metal Oxide Nanoparticles
NATHAN REED, Jiaxi Fang, Sanmathi Chavalmane, Pratim Biswas, Washington University in St Louis
Abstract Number: 509 Working Group: Nanoparticles and Materials Synthesis
Abstract Composite nanoparticles are widely used as components in paints, pigments, and health and beauty products. Many developing applications for composite nanoparticles including catalysis, drug delivery, and energy storage require increasingly fine control of properties and composition. While composite nanoparticles have been widely synthesized and characterized (1,2), little work has systematically looked at correlation between the initial concentration of precursors and final concentration of the nanoparticles. In this work, we study the mechanisms of composite nanoparticle formation in a diffusion flame aerosol reactor by investigating the relationship between the initial precursor concentration for different elements and the final nanoparticle composition at various precursor molar ratios. The particle composition of each element concentration is measured by direct injection of the synthesized nanoparticles into an inductively coupled- optical spectrometer (ICP-OES) plasma (in-situ characterization) for an Fe and Si composite system. Real time measurements from direct injection will be compared to the results of ex situ measurements for elemental concentrations in the collected nanoparticles. Further investigation of precursor fate within flame aerosol synthesis systems that elucidate the mechanisms of composite particle formation will be discussed. This will provide a road map to more controllable synthesis with tunable particle properties.
1) Biswas, P., Wu, C.Y., Zachariah, M.R., and McMillin, B. "Characterization of iron oxide-silica nanocomposites in flames, Part II: Comparison of discrete-sectional model predictions to experimental data", Journal of Materials Research, 12(3): 714-723 (1997).
2) Sahu, M. and Biswas, P. "Single-step processing of copper-doped titania nanomaterials in a flame aerosol reactor", Nanoscale Research Letters, 6: 1-14 (2011).