Abstract

Electrochemical synthesis of nickel nanoclusters by pulsed current method

Author(s): Hassan Karami, Mohammad Reza Hormozi Nejad, Soodabeh Mohammadi

The main objective of this research is to prepare nickel nanoparticles with more porous structure by the pulsed current electrochemical method. In this method, there are some effective parameters including; pulse amplitude (current amount), pulse frequency, nickel salt concentration, ammonia concentration, structure director concentration, reduction agent concentration, and synthesis temperature, which were optimized by the “one at a time method”. A nickel optimized nanopowder was synthesized by using nickel chloride (0.005M) as precursor, silver nitrate as a nucleation agent (at 0.5% mole of nickel salt in the starting solution), polyvinyl pyrrolidone (PVP) as structure director (with PVP/Ni=1.7g/g), ammonia (2M), and hydrazine as reduction agent (withHydrazine/Ni=16 g/g) by pulsed current of 58mA.cm-2 with a frequency of 12 Hz. Themorphology and particle size of each synthesized sample was studied by scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The obtained results showed that temperature has no considerable effect on themorphology and particle size of nickel nanopowder. The nickel nanopowder synthesized in optimum conditions has excellent uniform and a more porous structure including nanoclusters with a particle size of approximately 10-20 nm. The obtained results indicate that the pulsed current electrochemical method can be used as a confident and controllable method for the preparation of nickel nanoparticles.