Synthesis of Au –Ag– Cu trimetallic alloy nanoparticles prepared by electrical exploding wire technique in distilled water

Abstract

Formation of Au–Ag–Cu ternary alloy nanoparticles (NPs) is of particular interest because this trimetallic system have miscible (Au–Ag and Au–Cu) and immiscible (Ag– Cu) system. So there is a possibility of phase segregation in this ternary system. At this challenge it was present attempts synthetic technique to generate such trimetallic alloy nanoparticles by exploding wire technique. The importance of preparing nanoparticles alloys in distilled water and in this technique makes the possibility of obtaining nanoparticles free of any additional chemical substance and makes it possible to be used in the treatment of cancer or diseases resulting from bacterial or virus with least toxic. In this work, three metals alloys Au-Ag-Cu nanoparticles (A, B, and C) were prepared by exploding wire with different ratio of each elements. A high purity wire with diameters (0.3mm) against plate of these alloys were held at 20V with respect to the wire achieving different currents of 75, 100 and 160 A in distilled water and then the size and a shape of the synthesized alloy nanoparticles modify by pulse laser with different energies, where the colloids of nanoparticles were exposed to one thousand pulses of 532 nm wavelengths per pulse from second harmonic Nd-YAG laser, after it has been focused by a lens with 15 cm focal length. The structural properties were studied using x-ray diffraction. It was found that alloy nanoparticles with crystalline structure identical with face center cubic (fcc) and there is a new phase was appear for the A alloy this phase have the name tetragonal AuCu. It can be concludes that electrical explosion wire in liquid medium (EEW) is promising technique for preparation metal alloy Au-Ag-Cu nanoparticles.