Professor Wu Minghong of Shanghai University and his collaborators published important research results on the morphology regulation of inorganic nanoparticles in nature chemistry

Recently, Professor Wu Minghong's team from the school of environmental protection of Shanghai University published in nature chemistry, a top journal in the field of chemistry, entitled "photography tuning of inorganic nanomaterials grow by precision through control of electronic decomposition and supersaturation" 10.1038/s41557-019-0298-6) In the traditional field of nano synthesis, surfactants, organic solvents, hard and soft templates are often used to synthesize nanoparticles with various morphologies The synthesis of these nanoparticles often needs to be carried out in the process of high temperature and high pressure, or slow solvothermal process, so it is difficult to synthesize a large number of nanoparticles quickly In addition, although precipitation reaction is also a well-known method to synthesize inorganic particles, it is difficult to control different morphologies precisely because of its fast reaction speed Therefore, it is very important to control the morphology of materials by precipitation In view of this, the team of Professor Wu Minghong from Shanghai University, together with the relevant research teams of Jia Zhao Wang, Shu Lei Chou from the University of Wollongong, Australia and Chen Jun from Nankai University, developed a general method to control the ionization constant and solution supersaturation of precipitant, which realized the accurate control of the one-dimensional, two-dimensional and three-dimensional morphology of most commonly used inorganic materials Based on the Solubility Product Constants of different materials, the precipitant with different dissociation constants was chosen to react with metal cations These different precipitants include strong electrolyte and weak electrolyte It is found that the weak electrolyte with lower dissociation constant is more conducive to the growth of materials in different directions, such as one-dimensional and two-dimensional materials, while the strong electrolyte with complete dissociation is more conducive to the growth of three-dimensional materials in the same direction Through further research and analysis, the researchers found that when the precipitant is weak electrolyte, one-dimensional materials tend to grow at low supersaturation, while two-dimensional materials are more conducive to grow at high supersaturation When the precipitant is a strong electrolyte, when the supersaturation of the solution is adjusted to a lower value, the material is easy to grow into three-dimensional particles with morphology On the contrary, when the supersaturation of the solution is very high, the material will generate small amorphous particles The synthesis results of this work will show its application value in the field of energy storage and conversion and more materials, and will contribute to a systematic understanding of the different morphologies of liquid-phase synthesis.