1.4 Measuring the specific surface area of nanoparticle suspensions

Introduction

Surface area is a property of immense importance in the nano-world, especially in the area of heterogeneous catalysis. A solid catalyst works with its active sites binding to the reactants, and hence for a given active site reactivity, the higher the number of active sites available, the faster the reaction will occur. In heterogeneous catalysis, if the catalyst is in the form of spherical nanoparticles, most of the active sites are believed to be present on the outer surface. Thus it is very important to know the catalyst surface area in order to get a measure of the reaction time. One expresses this in terms of volume specific surface area, i.e., surface area/volume although in industry it is quite common to express it as surface area per unit mass of catalyst, e.g., m ² /g.

Overview of nmr

Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) is the study of the nuclei of the response of an atom to an external magnetic field. Many nuclei have a net magnetic moment with $I\neq 0$ , along with an angular momentum in one direction where I is the spin quantum number of the nucleus. In the presence of an external magnetic field, a nucleus would precess around the field. With all the nuclei precessing around the external magnetic field, a measurable signal is produced.

NMR can be used on any nuclei with an odd number of protons or neutrons or both, like the nuclei of hydrogen ( ¹ H), carbon ( ¹³ C), phosphorous ( ³¹ P), etc. Hydrogen has a relatively large magnetic moment (μ = 14.1 x 10 ^-27 J/T) and hence it is used in NMR logging and NMR rock studies. The hydrogen nucleus composes of a single positively charged proton that can be seen as a loop of current generating a magnetic field. It is may be considered as a tiny bar magnet with the magnetic axis along the spin axis itself as shown in [link] . In the absence of any external forces, a sample with hydrogen alone will have the individual magnetic moments randomly aligned as shown in [link] .

Advantages of nmr over bet technique

BET measurements follow the BET (Brunner-Emmet-Teller) adsorption isotherm of a gas on a solid surface. Adsorption experiments of a gas of known composition can help determine the specific surface area of the solid particle. This technique has been the main source of surface area analysis used industrially for a long time. However BET techniques take a lot of time for the gas-adsorption step to be complete while one shall see in the course of this module that NMR can give you results in times averaging around 30 minutes depending on the sample. BET also requires careful sample preparation with the sample being in dry powder form, whereas NMR can accept samples in the liquid state as well.

How does nmr work?

Polarization

Polarization involves the alignment of the individual magnetic nuclei in the presence of a static external magnetic field B _o . This external field exerts a torque that forces the spinning nuclei to precess around it by a frequency given by the Larmor frequency given by [link] , where γ is the gyromagnetic ratio which is a characteristic property of the nucleus. For hydrogen, γ/2π = 42.58 MHz/Tesla. This value is different for different elements.