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Unveiling mechanism of surface-guided platinum nanowire growth

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Abstract

Surface-guided growth of non-planar nanowires on functional substrates offers the new opportunity to precisely control their diameter, length, density and alignment, which will greatly benefit their direct integration into practical devices for large-scale applications. However, control of noble metal nanowires growth and arrangement remains a great challenge, and the mechanistic understanding is still limited. Herein, we choose Pt as a model material system to study the synthesis conditions required to control the in situ growth of aligned Pt nanowires on flat titanium substrate via a one-step and room-temperature green chemical synthesis process in aqueous solution. Most importantly, it is for the first time discovered that ordered nanoarrays and self-assembled nanoflowers can be directly grown on flat Ti substrate by merely adjusting the reaction times, without use of any soft/hard templates, surfactants and organic solvents. The proposed surface-guided growth mechanisms for nanoarray and nanoflower formation in this study may shed light on understanding of oriented arrangement/assembly of one-dimensional Pt nanowires into desirable morphologies for a variety of practical device applications.

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Acknowledgements

The authors greatly appreciate the support from US Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) under the Fuel Cell Technologies Office Award Number DE-EE0008426 and DE-EE0008423, National Renewable Energy Laboratory under Award DE-AC36-08GO28308, and National Energy Technology Laboratory under Award DE-FE0011585. A portion of the research work was carried out at the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences, which is a DOE Office of Science User Facility. The authors also wish to express their appreciation to Dale Hensley, Dayrl Briggs, Alexander Terekhov, Douglas Warnberg, and Dr. Brian Canfield for their help.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Nanodynamics and High-Efficiency Lab for Propulsion and Power (NanoHELP), Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Biomedical Engineering, UT Space Institute, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, 37388, USA

    Zhiqiang Xie, Shule Yu, Kui Li, Lei Ding, Weitian Wang & Feng-Yuan Zhang

  2. Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN, 37831, USA

    Haoran Yu, David A. Cullen, Harry M. Meyer III & Jefferey S. Baxter

  3. Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Institute of Materials Science, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, 06269, USA

    Can Cui & Pu-Xian Gao

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  1. Zhiqiang Xie
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  2. Shule Yu
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  3. Can Cui
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  4. Haoran Yu
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Correspondence to Feng-Yuan Zhang.

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Xie, Z., Yu, S., Cui, C. et al. Unveiling mechanism of surface-guided platinum nanowire growth. J Mater Sci 57, 12875–12885 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10853-022-07449-5

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