SYNTHESIS OF METAL OXIDES (Al2O3 AND ZrO2) NANOPARTICLES VIA PULSED LASER ABLATION IN LIQUIDS (PLAL) AND THEIR CHARACTERIZATION USING VARIOUS ANALYTICAL TECHNIQUES
Fasasi Teslim Ayinde , Mohammad Ashraf Gondal
كلية الهندسة-جامعة الملك فهد للبترول والمعادن · السعودية
Pulsed laser ablation in liquids (PLAL) is a novel technique that is capable of synthesizing colloidal solutions of nano materials. This technique is still in its infancy, and not a lot is familiar regarding this technique, neither much is known about what various conditions yield different types of materials. There are host of analytical techniques available to help us investigate the phenomena of ablation. These analytical techniques provide complimentary ideas that can be put together to obtain a picture of laser ablation in liquids. Analysis of the findings under various conditions gives us a moving picture which can tell the story of how the process works. During the course of experimentation with ablation processes within liquid media, discovery was made that there are many parameters that can affect the output of the process. Those factors include variation in the medium of ablation, laser wavelength, irradiation time and laser fluence. In this study, variation of solvent was confirmed to affect chemical and physical properties of nano materials. The effects of annealing temperature on the phase transformation of aluminium oxide produced were also investigated. Through investigating how different conditions affect nanomaterials properties, knowledge of the formation process is acquired and once the mechanisms involved in ablation within liquid media is understood, techniques can be applied to produce nanoparticles with tailored characteristics. The introduction on PLAL technique and nanomaterials as well as the aim and objectives of this research are explicitly discussed in Chapter 1. Chapter 2 reviews the previous studies that have attracted great interest on the development of PLAL technique and employing it to fabricate metal oxides NPs. Detailed description of the experimental procedure involved in PLAL technique employed in this research to synthesize metal oxide NPs was presented in chapter 3. The detailed experimental procedure was provided to serve as a small encyclopedia of methods for future work to rely on. After ablation, the produced NPs were characterized by a host of techniques like XRD, SEM, FE-SEM, TEM, TGA, EDS, XPS, SAED, Uv-Vis and FT-IR. XRD provides information about the structure of the nanoparticles synthesized, SEM, FE-SEM and TEM provided great information about the morphology of our sample, EDS and XPS spectra provided elemental analysis and stoichiometric ratio of the elements present in the prepared nanoparticles. SAED helps in displaying the crystallinity of the materials while Uv-Vis and FT-IR are employed to study the optical properties of the synthesized nanoparticles. Details of these analytic techniques are elaborated in Chapter 3 of this thesis. Experiments on aluminium (Al) and Zirconium (Zr) in chapter 4 delve into the effects of annealing temperatures on the phase transformation of alumina nanoparticles synthesized via PLAL and the effects of oxidizing media on the physical and chemical properties of colloidal zirconia nanoparticles produce via PLAL. Lastly, Chapter 5 summarizes the whole information or results of this research and the recommendations for future research.