High Effective Preparation of Amorphous-Like Si Nanoparticles Using Spark Erosion Followed by Bead Milling.

Mingcai Zhao,Qi Zhang,Wei Wang,Juan Zhang

doi:10.3390/nano11030594

Abstract

This work aims to prepare the silicon nanoparticles with the nanocrystal-embedded amorphous structure through spark erosion followed by bead milling. Spark erosion breaks up monocrystal silicon ingots into micro/nanoparticles, refines the crystal grains, makes the crystals randomly disordered, and increases isotropic character. Bead milling further refines the crystal grains to a few nanometers and increases the amorphous portion in the structure, eventually forming an amorphous structure with the nanocrystals embedded. Spark erosion saves much time and energy for bead milling. The crystallite size and the amount of amorphous phase could be controlled through varying pulse durations of spark discharge and bead milling time. The final particles could contain the nanocrystals as small as 4 nm and the content of amorphous phase as high as 84% and could be considered as amorphous-like Si nanoparticles. This processing route for Si nanoparticles greatly reduced the production time and the energy consumption and, more importantly, is structure-controllable and scalable for mass production of the products with higher purity.

Highlights

Silicon nanomaterials have specific physical and chemical characters due to their small size and large surface area, which find them a broad application in many fields [1]
This paper presents a combined process route to prepare Si nanoparticles using spark erosion followed by bead milling
A route combining two techniques was used to successfully prepare silicon nanoparticles that possess an amorphous control the formation of nanocrystal and amorphous regions

Summary

Introduction

Silicon nanomaterials have specific physical and chemical characters due to their small size and large surface area, which find them a broad application in many fields [1]. Erogbogbo et al used silicon quantum dots with nanocrystalline structures as luminescent labels to image cancer cells [2]. Drugs could be efficiently delivered by special Si nanostructures on special occasions rather than traditional oral and injection [5]. In the photovoltaic field, nanosized silicon ink could improve solar cell efficiency obviously with proper technology [6]. In the new energy field, the application to the lithium-ion battery (LIB) has pushed the study of Si nanomaterials to the highest level, and

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