Showing papers by "Xiaoyuan Chen published in 1999"

Synthesizing and Dispersing Silver Nanoparticles in a Water-in-Supercritical Carbon Dioxide Microemulsion.

Abstract: Reverse micelles and microemulsions formed in liquid and supercritical carbon dioxide (CO{sub 2}) allow highly polar or polarizable compounds to be dispersed in this nonpolar fluid. However, since the polarizability per unit volume of dense CO{sub 2} is quite low, it is difficult to overcome the strong van der Waals attractive interactions between particles in order to stably suspend macromolecular species. Conventional surfactants by themselves do not form reverse micelles or microemulsions in CO{sub 2} because the van der Waals interdroplet attractions are too high. The use of surfactants or cosurfactants with fluorinated tails provides a layer of a weakly attractive compound covering the highly attractive droplet cores, thus preventing their short-range interactions that would destabilize the system. Using this strategy, the authors describe a method to synthesize and stabilize metallic silver nanoparticles having diameters from 5 to 15 nm in supercritical CO{sub 2} using an optically transparent, water-in-CO{sub 2} microemulsion.