A statistical approach to controlling the size of aluminum nanoparticles synthesized by pulsed laser ablation in liquid

In this study, pulsed laser ablation in liquid (PLAL) was performed to synthesize nanoparticles by irradiating a laser to a target material in a specific solvent. The effect of laser parameters on the size and deviation of nanoparticles was quantitatively analyzed using the design of experiments. The increased laser energy induced rapid plasma expansion, reducing the size of the synthesized nanoparticles. However, when the laser energy exceeds a critical value, the ablation rate was reduced because the primary synthesized nanoparticles absorb the subsequent laser energy. When the laser beam diameter increased, the probability that the vapor atoms or ions collide with each other increased, but the change in the final particle size was minimal because most of the generated particles were fragmented by exposure to subsequent laser beams. The size deviation of the nanoparticles produced by PLAL decreased with increasing laser energy and increasing beam diameter as the effect of the subsequent laser beam became prominent under this process condition. A methodology for determining the process conditions for producing aluminum (Al) nanoparticles with the desired size and minimum deviation was proposed and validated through analysis of variance (ANOVA) and simple mathematical modeling.