Title:
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Coated magnetic nanoparticles for applications in analytical chemistry and catalysis
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Magnetic nano-materials have recently attracted much attention since they may have
potentially many new exciting applications in a wide range of areas. The research
described in this thesis has particularly focused on design, synthesis, assembling, testing
and characterisation of some novel magnetic nano-materials for potential applications.
Thus, a number of new magnetic nanoparticles, in particular core-shell metal, metal oxide
or alloy particles encapsulated in ultra-thin porous materials including FeOx, FePt, and
Fe3Pt in C, Si02 and Ti02 coatings have been prepared using various bottom-up nanochemistry
synthetic methods including micro-emulsion, controlled decomposition, polyol
reduction process, hydrothermal and slow evaporation techniques. Also, in this thesis, a
number of chemical treatments for the surface engineering of the magnetic particles are
discussed.
It is important to stress that this thesis describes some first exploratory research on the uses
of magnetic nanoparticles as magnetic separable nano-carriers for carrying solvent
droplets, bio-molecules and catalytically active species (oxidation) for applications. The
studies of two dimensional arrays of coated magnetic nanoparticles as ultra high density
surfaces for magnetic memory storage and three dimensional arrays as colloid supercrystals
for protein separation, etc are also described in this thesis.
The thesis is divided into seven chapters. The first chapter reviews the latest literature in
the area of magnetic nano-materials. The second chapter describes the uses of these nanomaterials to assist partition coefficient and protein binding constant measurements in
collaboration with my sponsor, AstraZeneca. The third, fourth and fifth chapters reveal the
design, synthesis and the architecture for one, two and three dimensional assembled
magnetic nano-materials for applications. The sixth chapter describes analytical
methodologies and instruments used for the characterisation of these particles. The final
chapter summarises the main contributions from my research during the PhD period.
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