Nanoparticle-Mediated, Light-Induced Phase Separations

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• 作者：Oara Neumann ; Albert D. Neumann ; Edgar Silva ; Ciceron Ayala-Orozco ; Shu Tian ; Peter Nordlander ; Naomi J. Halas
• 刊名：Nano Letters
• 出版年：2015
• 出版时间：December 9, 2015
• 年：2015
• 卷：15
• 期：12
• 页码：7880-7885
• 全文大小：387K
• ISSN：1530-6992

文摘

Nanoparticles that both absorb and scatter light, when dispersed in a liquid, absorb optical energy and heat a reduced fluid volume due to the combination of multiple scattering and optical absorption. This can induce a localized liquid鈥搗apor phase change within the reduced volume without the requirement of heating the entire fluid. For binary liquid mixtures, this process results in vaporization of the more volatile component of the mixture. When subsequently condensed, these two steps of vaporization and condensation constitute a distillation process mediated by nanoparticles and driven by optical illumination. Because it does not require the heating of a large volume of fluid, this process requires substantially less energy than traditional distillation using thermal sources. We investigated nanoparticle-mediated, light-induced distillation of ethanol-H₂O and 1-propanol-H₂O mixtures, using Au鈥揝iO₂ nanoshells as the absorber-scatterer nanoparticle and nanoparticle-resonant laser irradiation to drive the process. For ethanol-H₂O mixtures, the mole fraction of ethanol obtained in the light-induced process is substantially higher than that obtained by conventional thermal distillation, essentially removing the ethanol-H₂O azeotrope that limits conventional distillation. In contrast, for 1-propanol-H₂O mixtures the distillate properties resulting from light-induced distillation were very similar to those obtained by thermal distillation. In the 1-propanol-H₂O system, a nanoparticle-mediated, light-induced liquid鈥搇iquid phase separation was also observed.