Since discovery of the seed-mediate synthesis of gold nanorods around the beginning of the 21st century, progress in improving the yield of gold nanorods has been arduous at best.  Furthermore, some synthetic control has been found through traces amounts of silver nitrate; however, the process has difficulties with reproducibility, monodispersity, and morphological impurities.  Multivariate factorial design of experiments allows for the measurement of multiple effects and their addition with more precision and fewer trial runs than one-factor-at-a-time design of experiments.   Multivariate factorial design of experiments detects and measures non-additive, interaction effects (i.e. coupled & higher-ordered factor interactions); whereas, one-factor-at-a-time design of experiments is restricted to studying one variable while holding all other factors fixed. Here in, we present a factorial design of experiments of seed-mediated synthesis of gold nanorods simultaneously considering numerous factors including the amount of NaBH4, gold seed particles, ascorbic acid, silver nitrate; the age of the seed solution; the temperature of the synthesis; and many more. The effect of these variables on the longitudinal localized surface plasmon resonance peak position; absolute nanoparticle dimensions, distribution, and morphological impurities; and total Au0 yield were monitored to determine important design factors in controlling these features of the product gold nanorods.

Gold nanorod synthesis: A multivariate factorial design of experiments

248th National Meeting (2014)

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