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. 2021 Jan 5;4(2):1136–1148. doi: 10.1021/acsanm.0c02771

Figure 2.

Figure 2

Ex situ, bulk etching of AAC silica nanoparticles. (A) TEM imaging of AAC silica particles dried after being dispersed in a NaOH aqueous solution. AAC silica particles etch homogeneously, decreasing in size over time. (B) Time evolution of the etching process of AAC silica spheres in aqueous NaOH solutions. The data was obtained from TEM imaging of dried samples taken at different time points. (C) Time evolution of the etching process of AAC silica spheres in aqueous NaOH solutions followed by DLS during the first 20 h of the process. The etching process shows two parts. For the first hours (up to around 300 min), the decrease in diameter was slow. The second part (from 300 to 1200 min) of the etching process showed a faster decrease of diameter. (D) Slope of the second part of the etching was fitted by linear regression. The speed of the etching increased with the base concentration, but the change in rate was smaller for higher base concentrations. The color of each data point refers to the base concentration as depicted in C.