Nanoparticles are complex substances that are less than 100 nanometers, or about the size of a virus, but they have a variety of potential applications, from medicine to energy to electronics. Today, Incompatible experiments yield new nanoscale particles with high potential.
Chemists innovate by finding the best conditions to focus on one product. For example, nanoparticles have been developed to create eye glasses that are resistant to light and red sunlight. A team of Penn State researchers has changed this method by deliberately using negative conditions to produce multiple products at once. This method allowed them to discover new nanoparticles, which combine many different substances and different structures. They’ve inspected the nanoparticles to develop new instructions that allow them to have an exclusive version of nanoparticles new nanoparticles.
Nanoparticines who can use it to use water using water using the water, and settle other important health and processed. These materials may need to include different types of semiconductors, catalysts, magnets, and other materials to make them work, while maintaining the required size and shape.
“There are many laws that we and others have developed in this area that allow us to create different types of nanoparticles,” said Raymond Schaak, DuPont Professor of Materials Chemistry at Penn State and head of the ‘Research Team’. . “And we can predict, especially with computers, tens of thousands of different nanoparticles that might be interesting to study, but we don’t know how to get the most out of them. We need a new law that allows us to create nanoparticles with new materials, new functions or new applications, which allows us to make the speed at which they can be predicted.
The current set of rules, or guidelines, available to researchers limit the types of nanoparticles they can create, so researchers have set up experiments under harsh conditions and have not been discovered before to see s ‘they can create new models that are not recent discovered before.
“What we’re doing can be described as ‘untargeted research,'” said Connor R. McCormick, a graduate student in chemistry at Penn State and first author of the paper. “If you have a goal in mind, you try to manipulate the chemistry to achieve that goal, but you have to know what you’re going to do – you have to know the rules – ahead of time. The exciting thing about our approach is that we let chemistry guide us and show us what is possible. We can define those products and find out what we can manage to create them intentionally.
The researchers used simple rod-shaped nanoparticles composed of a single component, copper sulfide, which contains atoms (“cations”) of copper. They can replace some or all of the copper in the particles with other metals using a process called “cation exchange”. The composition of the metals in the material and the spaces between them determine the characteristics of the material. Typically, this process is performed one machine at a time using experimental conditions designed to effectively control the cation exchange reaction. Here, in an experiment, researchers added four different metal cations at the same time under conditions that were not favorable for metal transformation. They also tentatively characterized the resulting particles using electron microscopy and X-ray scattering.
McCormick said, “Unlike most experiments, which are designed to combine into one product, our goal is to set up the experiment to increase the diversity of the nanoparticles we have created,” said McCormick. “Of the 201 parts we examined through experiments, 102 are unique and most of them cannot be intentionally created using current design principles.”
The team then carried out the experiment using slightly modified variables, changing the temperature of the reaction or the equilibrium with different types of metal cations. In doing so, they created even more complex nanoparticles and eventually were able to understand new laws that explained how to create new types of nanoparticles.
Finally, the team chose one of the new products and used the new design principles to make it good enough to produce it on a large scale.
“Eventually, this system will be used to evaluate new products, but for now, we’re focused on learning as much as possible about what’s possible,” Schaak said. “We have shown that this research method can help us identify these ‘new rules’ and use them in a rational way to create new complex nanoparticles with high yields.”
An article describing these experiments appeared on January 9th in the journal Nature Synthesis.
