Effects of Different Functional Group-containing Organic Modifiers on Morphology-controlled Synthesis of Silver Nanoparticles at Room Temperature

摘要

Silver nanoparticles have been extensively studied in recent years because of their high catalytic activity[1], distinct optical and electric properties [2-7], and potential photocatalytic bactericidal activity [8] as compared with their bulk counterparts. A lot of approaches have been employed for the synthesis of silver nanoparticles, in which various organic modifiers have been used to control the size and structure of silver nanoparticles. It has been demonstrated that organic modifiers not only influence the size and dispersivity of the silver nanoparticles by steric and electrostatic effects but also can directly influence the morphology of the silver nanoparticles under suitable conditions [9-11]. Albeit the research on the effects of organic modifiers is abundant, there are still numerous "bottlenecks" hindering this field. One particular hindrance is the lack of general principles that allow scientists to prepare silver nanoparticles with a predetermined size, size distribution, and morphology using different functional group-containing organic modifiers. The hindrance may be due to the lack of systematic investigation on how the different functional groups in organic modifiers affect the synthesis of silver nanoparticles with different morphologies under comparable experimental conditions. Furthermore, many reductants have been commonly used for the synthesis of silver nanoparticles, hut until now, the influence of the reducibility of the reductant on crystal grown rate of the silver nanoparticles is seldom investigated under comparable reaction conditions. In the present study, we endeavored to gain an insight into the effects of different functional groups in organic modifiers and the reducibility of reductant on the size, size distribution, and morphology of the resulting silver nanoparticles synthesized by a wet chemical reduction method at room temperature. The detailed preparation conditions of the silver nanoparticles are illustrated in Table 1.