Issue 11, 2021

Continuous gas-phase synthesis of core–shell nanoparticles via surface segregation

Abstract

Synthesis methods of highly functional core@shell nanoparticles with high throughput and high purity are in great demand for applications, including catalysis and optoelectronics. Traditionally chemical synthesis has been widely explored, but recently, gas-phase methods have attracted attention since such methods can provide a more flexible choice of materials and altogether avoid solvents. Here, we demonstrate that Cu@Ag core–shell nanoparticles with well-controlled size and compositional variance can be generated via surface segregation using spark ablation with an additional heating step, which is a continuous gas-phase process. The characterization of the nanoparticles reveals that the Cu–Ag agglomerates generated by spark ablation adopt core–shell or quasi-Janus structures depending on the compaction temperature used to transform the agglomerates into spherical particles. Molecular dynamics (MD) simulations verify that the structural evolution is caused by heat-induced surface segregation. With the incorporated heat treatment that acts as an annealing and equilibrium cooling step after the initial nucleation and growth processes in the spark ablation, the presented method is suitable for creating nanoparticles with both uniform size and composition and uniform bimetallic configuration. We confirm the compositional uniformity between particles by analyzing compositional variance of individual particles rather than presenting an ensemble-average of many particles. This gas-phase synthesis method can be employed for generating other bi- or multi-metallic nanoparticles with the predicted configuration of the structure from the surface energy and atomic size of the elements.

Graphical abstract: Continuous gas-phase synthesis of core–shell nanoparticles via surface segregation

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
18 Dec 2020
Accepted
14 Apr 2021
First published
14 Apr 2021
This article is Open Access
Creative Commons BY license

Nanoscale Adv., 2021,3, 3041-3052

Continuous gas-phase synthesis of core–shell nanoparticles via surface segregation

M. Snellman, N. Eom, M. Ek, M. E. Messing and K. Deppert, Nanoscale Adv., 2021, 3, 3041 DOI: 10.1039/D0NA01061H

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence. You can use material from this article in other publications without requesting further permissions from the RSC, provided that the correct acknowledgement is given.

Read more about how to correctly acknowledge RSC content.

Social activity

Spotlight

Advertisements