Synthesis, Characterization, and Combustion of Nanothermites – SyTCOM

The aim of this project is to produce nanothermites of controlled metal-oxide architecture and interface using efficient processes transferable to an industrial production, in order to guarantee stability of behaviors and performances and to increase reaction rates.
The current approaches used in the nanomaterials community for multiple applications taking advantage of the reduction of the size of the structures at nanometric scale are starting to be implemented to the nanothermites domain. Nanopowders are simply mixed and the results obtained are quite promising. However, during mixing, strong local heterogeneities in the particle distribution are inevitable, and the manipulation and the synthesis of these powder mixtures impose safety constraints ('worker exposure') which could lead to significant costs for an eventual industrial development. Considering this, it is interesting to find an alternative of this simple mixture of nanopowders and to consider nanostructured metal-oxide composites in which the two materials are intimately linked and homogeneously distributed even at small scale. These nanocomposites can have many architectures: individual coating of aluminum nanoparticles with the oxide, coating of oxide nanoparticles with aluminum, ... with different possibilities of shapes and dimension.
In this project we propose a physicochemical and modeling approach to perform a rational design of nanothermites, from several metal-oxide pairs (Al / CuO, Al / Sb2O5, Al / WO3 ...) by controlling the process parameters: the dimensions of the particles (metal and oxide), their morphology, their interface, and the porosity of the architecture.
Several nano thermites will be synthesized according to different protocols then characterized and studied in combustion and by heat treatments. The results obtained experimentally will be totally original and very useful to understand the physicochemical processes involved. They will also be used to develop a detailed kinetic model of combustion.