A review: Synthetic strategy control of magnetite nanoparticles production

Iron oxide nanoparticles excite researcher interest in biomedical applications due to their low cost, biocompatibility and superparamagnetism properties. Magnetic iron oxide especially magnetite ($Fe_3O_4$) possessed a superparamagnetic behaviour at certain nanosize which beneficial for drug and gene delivery, diagnosis and imaging. The properties of nanoparticles mainly depend on their synthesis procedure. There has been a massive effort in developing the best synthetic strategies to yield appropriate physico-chemical properties namely co-precipitation, thermal decomposition, microemulsions, hydrothermal and sol-gel. In this review, it is discovered that magnetite nanoparticles are best yielded by co-precipitation method owing to their simplicity and large production. However, its magnetic saturation is within range of 70-80 emu/g which is lower than thermal decomposition and hydrothermal methods (80-90 emu/g) at 100 nm. Dimension wise, less than 100 nm is produced by co-precipitation method at $70^{\circ}C-80^{\circ}C$ while thermal decomposition and hydrothermal methods could produce less than 50 nm but at very high temperature ranging between $200^{\circ}C$ and $300^{\circ}C$. Thus, co-precipitation is the optimum method for pre-compliance magnetite nanoparticles preparation (e.g., 100 nm is fit enough for biomedical applications) since thermal decomposition and hydrothermal required more sophisticated facilities.