Morphological control and electrostatic deposition of silver nanoparticles produced by condensation-evaporation method

증발-응축법에 의해 발생된 은(silver) 나노입자의 구조제어 및 전기적 부착 특성 연구

This paper describes a condensation-evaporation method (CEM) to produce size-controlled spherical silver nanoparticles by perturbing coagulation and coalescence processes in the gas phase. Polydisperse silver nanoparticles generated by the CEM were first introduced into a differential mobility analyzer (DMA) to select a group of silver nanoparticles with same electrical mobility, which also enables to make a group of nanoparticles with elongated structures and same projected area. These silver nanoparticles selected by the DMA were then in-situ sintered at ${\sim}600^{\circ}C$, and then they were observed to turn into spherical shaped nanoparticles by the rapid coalescence process. With the assistance of modified converging-typed quartz reactor, we can also produce the 10 times higher number concentration of silver nanoparticles compared with a general quartz reactor with uniform diameter. Finally, the spherical silver nanoparticles with 30 nm were electrostatically deposited on the surface of silicon substrate with the coverage rate of ~4%/hr. This useful preparation method of size-controlled monodisperse silver nanoparticles developed in this work can be applied to the various studies for characterizing the physical, chemical, optical, and biological properties of nanoparticles as a function of their size.