The Effects of Processing on the Morphology of Nanoparticles

Abstract

One of the major challenges confronting the utilization of nanoparticles in industrial and social applications is that of producing the nanoscale materials. Of the methods of manufacturing nanoscale materials, processes involving plasmas have been shown to be cost-effective and versatile in the production of chemically diverse material. Using transmission electron microscopy, individual nanoparticles produced by a thermal plasma-based production method have been examined. The observations of these studies imply that the thermal history of the nanoparticles during formation is of great importance in the determination of the resulting nanoparticle morphology. Such results have the potential to enable the manufacturing of nanoparticles of a specific size and shape from plasmas.

Nano-Particle Sizing in a Thermal Plasma Synthesis Reactor

“…(5) Construction of the Richardson plot which is obtained by the determination of the perimeter of the object for various lengths of a yardstick [29]. (6) The automatic extraction of the fractal dimensions follows by identifying jump points larger than 0.15 (7).…”

“…For this reason, many researchers [3][4][5][6][7] have become involved in the investigation of the tailoring of produced nano-powders with specific properties, such as their degree of agglomeration and size distribution. Furthermore, for some applications and the associated process control and for modeling calibration, there is the need to access to the formation and growth history during the induction plasma synthesis process.…”