Environmentally Friendly Preparation of Functional Nanomaterials and Their Application

One of the most important environmental problems is global warming. Global warming is caused by increase in the amounts of water vapor, methane, carbon dioxide and other gases being released into the atmosphere as a result of the burning of fossil fuels. It has thus become important to reduce fossil fuel use. Environmentally friendly preparation of functional materials has, therefore, attracted much interest for environmental problems. Furthermore, nature mimetic processes are recently been of great interest as environmentally friendly one. There have been many studies on fabrication of various functional nanocrystals. Among various nanocrystal fabrication techniques, flux growth is an environmentally friendly, very convenient process and can produce functional nanocrystals at temperatures below the melting points of the solutes. Furthermore, this technique is suitable for the synthesis of crystals having an enhedral habit. In flux growth, the constituents of the materials to be crystallized are dissolved in a suitable flux (solvent) and crystal growth occurs as the solution becomes critically supersaturated. The supersaturation is attained by cooling the solution, by evaporation of the solvent or by a transport process in which the solute is made to flow from a hotter to a cooler region. Many kinds of oxide nanocrystals have been grown in our laboratory. For example, zero- (e.g., particle), one- (e.g., whisker and tube) and two-dimensional (e.g., sheet) nanocrystals were successfully grown by flux method. Our flux-growth technique has some industrial and ecological merits because the nanocrystal fabrication temperatures are far below their melting points and because the used reagents are less harmless to human being and the environment.