Figure 8.

The DMA-APM data of silver nanoparticle aggregates sintered at different temperatures ranging from 20 to 600 °C by Kim et al. (2009) are post-processed here and the exponent D_fm and prefactor k_m of eq. 10 are determined. At T = 20 the D_fm and k_m are in agreement with agglomerates from the present simulations (D_fm = 2.15 and k_m = 1.11). Higher furnace temperatures result in faster sintering and also more compact structures. At T = 600°C the aggregates with d_m = 50, 80 and 100 nm have almost fully coalesced (D_fm = 2.95, k_m = 0.88) while the larger ones lag behind. A maximum in k_m is found here at T = 200°C consistent with the present work (Fig. 6b).