NANOMORPH

NANOMORPH, is an ANR project emerging from a consortium between industrials in chemistry and optics, and academics specialized in electromagnetic metrology and physico-chemistry of nanoparticles. The main goal of this research project lies in the development and the pre-prototyping of an innovative optical instrument to measure the distributions of sizes and shapes (aspect ratio) of flows of nanowire suspensions. This work is thought to be crucial for nanotechnology industries, nanosciences and in nanotoxicity researches, as well as for policies and administrative authorities. Indeed, all the instrumentation currently available on the market, to characterize nanowires, is of a laboratory type (off-line measurements of a sample) and only uses an "equivalent spherical particle" model to inverse the data. During the present research project, two innovative and complementary optical techniques will be investigated and developed. The first technique is based on the analysis the static light scattering properties of nanowire. It requires a prior determination of nanowire dispersion, stabilization and hydrodynamic orientation in flows. The second optical method is based on a pulsed photo-thermal method which necessitates the modeling of the absorption of light with nanowire and the related multi-physics phenomena. In this project, a complete analytical approach is planned to explain the causalities and to optimize each step of the various developments. As a consequence, the expected results exceed largely the frame of the optical instrumentation. The originality of this project is in the integration of R&D questioning with industrial and environmental requirements (i.e. security, quality, time efficiency, reliability and traceability) on flowing nanoparticles with high aspect ratio.