Electroless Plating of Metal Nanomaterials

Abstract

Electroless plating is commonly associated with metallizing macroscopic work pieces, but also represents a surprisingly powerful nanomanufacturing tool. This review details the technique's use for creating nanomaterials of arbitrary dimensionality, ranging from nanoparticles over nanotubes, nanowires, and ultrathin films to nanostructured lattices, focusing on the solution chemistry and mechanistic aspects. The synthesis of defined nanostructures serves as overarching perspective, which is enriched by drawing connections to and insights from related fields. Strategies for controlling the size, shape, crystallinity, porosity, composition, and arrangement of electrolessly plated nanostructures are outlined, including templating (which harnesses the method's exceptional conformality to guide and limit deposit formation), the complementary approach of selective growth, tailored seeding, and bath design. Being able to strike convincing compromises between material quality and ease of preparation, electroless nanoplating has a distinct potential to facilitate the application of metal nanomaterials.

A Novel Cu2O/ZnO@PET Composite Membrane for the Photocatalytic Degradation of Carbendazim

“…Composite TeMs are a class of versatile micro- and nanoporous materials that contain ordered arrays of nano- or microtubes and are produced via electrochemical or electroless template deposition approaches [ 32 , 33 ]. The precise accuracy, pore sizes and high chemical stability of the polymer templates based on track membranes allow various types of simple and multicomponent compounds to be readily deposited in their pores.…”

Exchange-Coupling of Hard/Soft Magnetic Phases of Co/FeCo Nanocomposites

“…More interestingly, electroless plating, as a mild liquid phase route, can form a continuous coating on the particle surface in most reports. 16 However, for transition metals, it is an autocatalytic process, that is, the presence of metallic Co particles will catalyze the formation of FeCo on the surface and generate the desired magnetic substances, thus promoting the close bonding of Co/FeCo. We analyzed that the Co particles have a defective active surface after activation treatment.…”

“…More importantly, this process easily forms a uniform and continuous coating on the surface of the particles by controlling the rate, which can promote the interphase homogeneity. 16,17 Many reports have studied rare earth permanent magnets with different soft magnetic phases. For example, magnetic composites such as SmCo plating, proving the feasibility of this method in the synthesis of Co-based magnetic nanocomposites.…”

Increasing the structural and compositional diversity of ion-track templated 1D nanostructures through multistep etching, plastic deformation, and deposition

“…The pronounced dependence of the properties of a nanomaterial on its shape, size, composition, alignment and surrounding makes a high degree of synthetic control mandatory to investigate structure-property relationships and to fully utilize their functionality. Templating provides an excellent degree of control over structural parameters, which often can be independently and simultaneously adjusted, and thus is of special interest for preparing (John) well-defined nanostructures [1][2][3].…”

“…One-dimensional nanostructures are frequently created by depositing materials into the enlongated pores of template membranes [1,4]. This strategy harnesses the synthetic flexibility offered by the diverse range of accessible architectures and available deposition techniques to produce nanorods, nanotubes (NTs), nanowires (NWs) or alterations of such structural motifs, composed of different material classes such as metals [2,[5][6][7][8], semiconductors [9], polymers [7,10], oxides [11,12], ionic compounds [13] or carbon [14]. Such materials have attracted attention in various applications, Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence.…”