Here, we will present an overview of several projects centered around colloidal nanocrystal (NC) design and synthesis for naval applications. These applications include structural health monitoring, taggants, and corrosion resistance. The first two applications require the design of metallic NCs with a large refractive index (RI)-sensitivity. The taggant-focused design also leverages tunable plasmonic properties beyond the local environment dependence such as NC size-, shape-, and composition-dependent properties. In both of these designs, we show that new multifunctional platforms are possible with less conventional plasmonic metals. In fact, to the best of our knowledge, these bimetallic NCs display the highest ensemble RIS measurement to date for colloids with LSPR maximum band positions ≤ 900 nm in water. This effect is accounted for by the lower dielectric dispersion at the resonant wavelength, and good agreement is found between experimental findings and simulations of the RIS.The corrosion resistant NC design leveraged recent reports of shape evolution of anisotropic metallic nanocrystals (NCs) during dissolution, which suggested that a new morphology-driven approach may be added to our current corrosion mitigation toolbox. These studies tracked NC morphology changes, using <i>in situ</i> transmission electron microscopy (TEM), and revealed that some colloidal NC shapes are short-lived while others are much longer lived. While the implications of these studies focused on the fundamental insight into NC morphology-stability relationships, we expand those implications to include new strategies to reduce corrosion susceptibility. For example, nanostructures that are resistant to dissolution in highly oxidizing environments may inform the design and selection of corrosion-resistant materials and finishing processes. Currently, there is a lack of morphology-lifetime correlation in corrosive environments for alloy NCs in which selective oxidation becomes a critical factor. Here, we present a mechanistic understanding of nanoscale structural evolution of in corrosive environments for a model bimetallic system utilizing <i>in situ</i> TEM. This mechanistic understanding drove the development of morphology-based design rules to inform the selection of materials that are resilient throughout their lifecycle.

Architecting nanomaterials for naval applications

2019 Spring National Meeting

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