A facile patterning of assembled silica nanoparticles with a closely packed arrangement is demonstrated over a wide area through a guided growth approach utilizing a micro-mold.
A new type of hierarchically porous materials is fabricated by assembling mesoporous nanoparticles via spray drying. Well-dispersed mesostructured silica nanoparticles (MSN), whose particle size distribution was narrow in the range of 20 nm and 50 nm, were prepared by a thermal deposition method. By spray drying a MSN suspension, MSN were assembled into spherical secondary particles. After calcination, the spherical particles have two types of mesopores, mesopores of 3 nm in size inside of calcined MSN and larger inter-nanoparticle mesopores of about 15-20 nm. This hierarchical pore system should provide nanospaces for efficient mass transport of guest species with different sizes.
For the fabrication of ceramic micro-scale patterns over a wide area, the Micro-molding in Capillaries MIMIC method is can be used by applying low solid loading colloidal suspensions of nanopowders. However, to uniformly form thick films from low solids loading suspensions, it is necessary that the additional spontaneous process of concentrating the suspensions in the molds occurs and is successfully accomplished, after the ordinary MIMIC process caused by capillary action. This concentration of suspension occurs as a result of inflow of the suspension from the entrance along with solvent evaporation from the exit of the mold. Therefore, the suspension preparation is important in order that the particles flow in due to the flow of the solvent. In this study, we determined the required condition of the suspension preparation by fabricating films from aqueous and ethanolbased suspensions of TiO2 nanopowders. By comparing the uniformity of the fabricated films and the particle distributions of the suspensions, it was found that the condition required for uniform patterning over a wide area is to disperse the nanoparticles into their primary size.
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