Nanocrystal Breakthrough May Help Industry
Newswise — The discovery of the atomic structure of technological materials like vanadium pentoxide nanotubes may support nanoscale industrial applications.
Valeri Petkov, a faculty member in Central Michigan University's physics department and lead researcher in an experiment at Argonne and Brookhaven National Laboratories, used a nontraditional experimental technique called Pair Distribution Function analysis to determine the three-dimensional structure of vanadium oxide nanotubes. An accurate knowledge of its three-dimensional structure is needed to better understand and control the material's useful properties.
"Once a good structural model is found, its parameters may be refined and then used to explain, predict and possibly improve the structure-sensitive properties of the nanomaterial," said Petkov. "This is a major advantage over using a statistical description of the structure as it is done with completely disordered materials like glasses."
The work, supported by a four-year, $200,000 National Science Foundation Nanoscale Interdisciplinary Research Team grant, indicates that the PDF technique may become a tool for structure determination in the emerging field of nanoscience and technology.
Crystalline vanadium pentoxide is a key industrial material used in optical switches, chemical sensors, catalysts and solid-state batteries. The material possesses an outstanding structural versatility and can be manufactured into nanotubes that have many useful properties and potential applications, said Petkov.
The researchers conducted synchrotron radiation diffraction experiments at the Advanced Photon Source at the Argonne National Laboratory and applied the nontraditional PDF technique. The nanotubes exhibited a well-defined nanometer scale structure, and the researchers were able to build a three-dimensional model.
The team's study, "Structure Beyond Bragg: Study of V2O5 Nanotubes," was published in the Feb. 25 Physical Review journal of The American Physical Society. The management of the APS sector, where the experiment was conducted, has selected the study as one of the outstanding recent results obtained at that sector.
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