Continuous synthesis of hollow silver–palladium nanoparticles for catalytic applications

Abstract

Hollow bimetallic nanoparticles exhibit unique surface plasmonic properties, enhanced catalytic activities and high photo-thermal conversion efficiencies amongst other properties, however, their research and further deployment are currently limited by their complicated multi-step syntheses. This paper presents a novel approach for their continuous synthesis with controllable and tuneable sizes and compositions. This robust manufacturing tool, consisting of coiled flow inverter (CFI) reactors connected in series, allows for the first time the temporal and spatial separation of the initial formation of silver seeds and their subsequent galvanic displacement reaction in the presence of a palladium precursor, leading to the full control of both steps separately. We have also demonstrated that coupling the galvanic replacement and co-reduction leads to a great kinetic enhancement of the system leading to a high yield process of hollow bimetallic nanoparticles, directly applicable to other metal combinations.