Theoretical study to investigate the impact of plasma parameters on the catalyst nanoparticle growth

Abstract

The plasma kinetics based model is adopted to elucidate the effect of plasma parameters on the nucleation and growth mechanism of catalyst nanoparticle. The present model considers the plasma processing of thin catalyst film, power equalization at the film surface, flux and kinetics of plasma species (electrons, ions, and neutrals). In our investigation, it is found that catalyst nanoparticle diameter decreases with increase in ion number density in plasma. Moreover, it is also found that catalyst film thickness significantly affect the catalyst nanoparticle size i.e., catalyst nanoparticle diameter increases with catalyst film thickness. In addition, it is observed that the substrate temperature increases during the plasma processing and finally achieve saturation. Our theoretical results are in good agreement with the experimental results.