(393d) Investigation of Morphology Formation of Metal-Oxides Nanoparticles Deposited By Electrospray

The production and deposition of the nanoparticles play signification role in today’s technologies. The morphology of generated particles and their pattern of deposition  on substrate have a significant influence on the final product properties. Various laboratory nanoparticles and thin film preparation techniques are hardly suitable for mass industrial production.

We focus on application of the electrospraying technique for nanoparticles generation and deposition, because it has many advantages over other nanoparticles producing and deposition techniques and offers the possibility of simple scale-up. Electrospraying has many adjustable parameters which significantly influence the final size of nanoparticles and the deposited layer morphology, so that it is a suitable method for the preparation of well-defined nanostructures made from various materials and serving for diverse applications.

We thoroughly investigate the effect of various electrospraying parameters (e.g., substrate temperature, electrodes distance, concentration and chemical structure of precursor, conductivity of the solution, surface tension and needle diameter) on the morphology of deposited layers consisting from metal (Ti, Mn, Ni, Co and Fe)-oxide nanoparticles. Morphology and composition of final layers and their evolution during the deposition were investigated by Atomic force microscopy (AFM), Scanning electron microscopy (SEM), Raman microscopy (RM) and X-ray diffraction (XRD). We thus characterize porosity of deposited nanoparticle layers, their uniform or non-uniform thickness and the spatial arrangement of deposited nanoparticles. The focus of our contribution is thus not the generation of nanoparticles, but on the patterns of their deposition. The results shows strong dependency between substrate temperature and final morphology of thin film of metal oxides. The difference is between electrospraying deposition under ambient temperature (24°C) and the boiling point of solution. In this interval the structure transform from dense to grainy, cage-like and neuron-like structure.