Green and Sustainable Manufacture of Ultrapure Engineered Nanomaterials.

Nanomaterials with very specific features (purity, colloidal stability, composition, size, shape, location…) are commonly requested by cutting-edge technologic applications, and hence a sustainable process for the mass-production of tunable/engineered nanomaterials would be desirable. Despite this, tuning nano-scale features when scaling-up the production of nanoparticles/nanomaterials has been considered the main technological barrier for the development of nanotechnology. Aimed at overcoming these challenging frontier, a new gas-phase reactor design providing a shorter residence time, and thus a faster quenching of nanoclusters growth, is proposed for the green, sustainable, versatile, cost-effective, and scalable manufacture of ultrapure engineered nanomaterials (ranging from nanoclusters and nanoalloys to engineered nanostructures) with a tunable degree of agglomeration, composition, size, shape, and location.

Scalable and Environmentally Benign Process for Smart Textile Nanofinishing.

A major challenge in nanotechnology is that of determining how to introduce green and sustainable principles when assembling individual nanoscale elements to create working devices. For instance, textile nanofinishing is restricted by the many constraints of traditional pad-dry-cure processes, such as the use of costly chemical precursors to produce nanoparticles (NPs), the high liquid and energy consumption, the production of harmful liquid wastes, and multistep batch operations. By integrating low-cost, scalable, and environmentally benign aerosol processes of the type proposed here into textile nanofinishing, these constraints can be circumvented while leading to a new class of fabrics.

Studying nanoparticles in-flight: applications of size-selected free nanoparticles.

Experimental investigation of nanoparticles in form of free particles in an inert gas is advantageous due to absence of substrate effects. Gas-phase synthesis techniques offer many possibilities for producing and manipulating nanoparticles. The most advanced technique produces well-defined nanoparticles, by means of inert-gas evaporation in a flowing gas, size-selection on the basis of the electrical mobility and subsequent sintering into monocrystalline and quasispherical nanoparticles.