Synthesis, characterization and spectral studies of surfactant (PVP, CTAB, and SDS) based ultrafine Ir-Cu bimetallic nanoparticles

Abstract

In this study, ultrafine bimetallic nanoparticles of Ir and Cu have been synthesised by chemical reduction method. The resultant particle's nature, size, surface morphology and elemental composition were computed through the course of XRD, TEM and field-emission electron microscopy (FE-SEM) respectively. CTAB, SDS and PVP were used to study the effect of surfactant on the particle size and their stability. The bimetallic nanoparticles are small in size, less dispersed, amorphous in nature and polygonal in shape. The approximate size of PVP, CTAB and SDS supported particles is 1.32, 8.0, 11.6 nm respectively by TEM and 0.98, 2.5 and 1.7 nm respectively by XRD. They are core-shell, with copper core and iridium shell. The XPS results of Ir-Cu/PVP-BMNPs show a deconvulated peak at 59.77 and 62.62 eV binding energy devoted to Ir(0) 4f7/2 and Ir(0) 4f5/2 respectively. The peak at 931.17 eV is the distinctive features of the Cu2p3/2 signal for Cu (0).