Self-organized nanostructured spherulitic crystal pattern formation in Belousov–Zhabotinsky type reaction system

Abstract

We report the formation of self-organized nanostructured spherulitic crystal pattern in a modified Belousov–Zhabotinsky (BZ) type system. In liquid phase, we observed the reaction system to exhibit well distinguishable spatial patterns including stripe and hexagonal structures. The solid phase nucleation was found to occur in the colloidal phase and nanostructured spherulitic crystal patterns were obtained as one of the final products. Transmission electron microscopy, scanning electron microscopy, optical microscopy, powder X-ray diffraction and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy were used to characterize the spherulitic crystal pattern. The average diameter of the grown crystals was found to be ∼30–100nm. In situ UV–Visible spectroscopic measurement exhibited damped oscillatory nature corresponding to ferroin in the reaction system. This oscillation was found to be well conjugated to the spherulitic structures. The paper elucidates the roles of the various possible factors behind such phase-transformation along with the plausible explanation of the corresponding reaction pathways.