Nanosight has announced that the School of Chemical Engineering at the University of Birmingham is using multiple nanoparticle characterisation systems to study viruses and catalyst nanoparticles.
Working in the group of Prof Kevin Kendall, Marie-Curie research fellow, Dr Shangfeng Du's research concentrates on the catalyst nanoparticles for fuel cells.
An important emphasis of this effort is on the synthesis of nanoparticle catalysts of Pt, Ni and base metals, especially to produce new degrees of aggregation in their structure, characterising the nanoparticles to define the new structures, compositions and processes.
For catalyst characterisation, knowing the particle size based on number is important as it is directly linked to the catalytic performance.
By knowing the size distribution of the particles in suspension, information on the molecular adhesion such as the singlet, doublet, triplet and larger aggregations can be obtained.
This is useful in the understanding of the processing of dispersions.
Before finding out about Nanosight, the group mainly used electron microscopy (TEM and SEM) and dynamic light scattering (DLS) to measure particle size and aggregation.
The main benefit of Nanosight's nanoparticle tracking analysis (NTA) is that it tracks particles individually, making it possible to analyse small aggregations such as doublets or triplets, which were not seen by DLS.
Moreover, it can be used to analyse the sample using a very low concentration which is difficult by DLS or electron microscopy techniques.
The work has already been expanded into the measurement of molecular interactions between nanoparticles and could have application use in a number of fields.
One such area is on-line calibration of virus number concentrations, which may be studied simultaneously with the interactions of viruses with polymer surfaces.
