Microfluidic synthesis of colloidal nanomaterials

This thesis focuses on microfluidics based approaches for synthesis and surface-engineering of colloidal particles. Bottom-up assembly through colloidal nucleation and growth is a popular route to the controlled synthesis of nanomaterials. Standard bench-scale synthetic chemistry techniques often involve non-uniform spatial and temporal distributions of concentration and temperature, and are not readily scalable. Photolithography-based microfabrication enables the application of classical techniques of chemical reaction engineering to design chemical reactors that cannot be realized easily at the macroscale, and that closely approach theoretical 'idealized' reactor configurations. In addition, the microfluidic format allows precisely controlled reaction conditions such as rapid mixing, and concentration and temperature uniformity. The goal of this thesis was to design microfluidic reactors for synthesis of core-shell colloidal particles with tunable sizes. Microscale segmented gas-liquid flows overcome the large axial dispersion effects associated with single-phase laminar flows. Microchannel devices that yielded uniform, stable gas-liquid segmented flows over three orders of magnitude in flow velocity were first developed.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Chemical Engineering.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2006

Author dc:creator

• Khan, Saif A

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Klavs F. Jensen and Martin A. Schmidt.

• Chemical Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/37223

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/37223