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One droplet reaction for synthesis of multi-sized nanoparticles

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Abstract

Reaction kinetics of nanoparticles can be controlled by tuning the Peclet number (Pe) as it is an essential parameter in synthesis of multi-sized nanoparticles. Herein, we propose to implement a self-driven multi-dimension microchannels reactor (MMR) for the one droplet synthesis of multi-sized nanoparticles. By carefully controlling the Pe at the gas—liquid interface, the newly formed seed crystals selectively accumulate and grow to a specific size. By the combination of microchannels of different widths and lengths, one droplet reaction in the same apparatus achieves the synchronous synthesis of diverse nanoparticles. MMR enables precise control of nanoparticle diameter at 5 nm precision in the range of 10–110 nm. The use of MMR can be extended to the synthesis of uniform Ag, Au, Pt, and Pd nanoparticles, opening towards the production and engineering of nanostructured materials. This approach gives the chance to regulate the accumulation probability for precise synthesis of nanoparticles with different diameters.

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Acknowledgements

This work was financially supported by the Beijing Nova Program from Beijing Municipal Science & Technology Commission (Nos. Z201100006820037 and Z211100002121001), the National Key R&D Program of China (No. 2018YFA0208501), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 22075296, 91963212, and 51961145102), the Youth Innovation Promotion Association, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (No. 2020032), and Beijing National Laboratory for Molecular Sciences (No. BNLMS-CXXM-202005). F. F. Q. and J. C. acknowledge the Swiss National Super Computing Center (Project No. s1081) for providing the computing support. B. D. C. acknowledges Jiarong Yang for his support in graphing.

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Author notes

  1. Bingda Chen and Feifei Qin contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Green Printing, Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing Engineering Research Center of Nanomaterials for Green Printing Technology, Beijing National Laboratory for Molecular Sciences (BNLMS), Beijing, 100190, China

    Bingda Chen, Meng Su, Daixi Xie, Zeying Zhang, Qi Pan, Huadong Wang, Xu Yang, Sisi Chen & Yanlin Song

  2. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China

    Bingda Chen, Meng Su, Daixi Xie, Huadong Wang, Xu Yang, Sisi Chen & Yanlin Song

  3. Chair of Building Physics, Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering, ETH Zürich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich), Zürich, 8092, Switzerland

    Feifei Qin, Jingwei Huang & Jan Carmeliet

  4. Department of Civil and Building Engineering, Université de Sherbrooke, Sherbrooke, QC, J1K 2R1, Canada

    Dominique Derome

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  1. Bingda Chen
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Correspondence to Meng Su or Yanlin Song.

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Chen, B., Qin, F., Su, M. et al. One droplet reaction for synthesis of multi-sized nanoparticles. Nano Res. 16, 5850–5856 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-022-5115-7

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