Philip Nash

Abstract:

Nanostructured materials have great potential in a large number of applications that can benefit society. Many applications such as catalysis and filtering take advantage of the high surface area and porosity that can result from nanostructures. The current issue for the synthesis of nanoscale materials often involves the use of chemical techniques that are inefficient and difficult to scale up. In many cases synthesis techniques are simply too slow to apply to a large-scale manufacturer. It is, therefore, beneficial to develop synthesis techniques to produce self-assembled, self-supported nanostructures on a large scale. This work is directed at addressing issues of self-assembly, structural alignment and scalability for the production of nanoscale plates through a novel synthesis technique. The synthesis technique is demonstrated using the discontinuous precipitation of a γ’ phase, (Ni, Co)3Al, followed by selective dissolution of the γ matrix phase. The production of the nanostructure requires heat treatments of the order of minutes and can be performed on a large scale making this synthesis technique of great economic potential. The resulting structure may have many applications in catalysis, filtering and heat management depending on the phase selection and added functionality through a chemical reaction with the retained phase.