Synthesizing and studying materials that reduce energy consumption or generate renewable energy is a rich field of research. Due to their diverse functionality, bulk transition metal pnictides (group 15) are a promising class of materials to evaluate for sustainable energy applications in these research areas i.e. magnetic refrigeration and catalysis for water splitting. However, in the nanometer regime, we lack a holistic understanding of how individual contributors, such as metal precursor reactivity and their behavior in particular synthetic environments affect the formation of desired products. In order to expand our toolbox for preparing complex transition metal phosphide nanoparticles, we seek to evaluate phosphidation rates as a function of temperature and time in monometallic (M2P; M=Fe, Co, Ni) and bimetallic (M2-xM’xP; M, M’ =Fe, Co, Ni) metal phosphide systems using various zero-valent metal carbonyl and di/tri-valent acetylacetonate salt precursors. These relative reactivity studies are critical to predicatively determine the optimal colloidal synthetic routes to new, complex trimetallic metal phosphide phases like Fe2-x-yNixCoyP.

Synthesis of trimetallic metal phosphide nanoparticles: predictive insights from the relative reactivity of mono- and bi-metallic systems

ACS Spring Meeting 2021

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