Skip to content

Welcome to the course materials

This is the main page. If you're new here, you may want to find out first what all of this is about. Otherwise, please select from the navigation sidebar the topic that you're interested in.

In brief

This course is supposed to be all about the synthesis of materials and nanomaterials (mostly bulk, inorganic, oxide materials). Although there's much to be said on this particular topic, in most real-life situations one encounters the following scenario:

  • You don't freely choose the synthesis method. Instead, you choose something that's available in your lab or in your collaborators' labs.
  • You don't always optimize the synthesis parameters. Most of the time, you just tweak things a little 'till you find something that works for you.
  • You can't calculate and predict everything. There's no software that feeds on the data such as "oh, I want to obtain this and that phase with this here particle size distribution" and yields an optimal method with an accurate set of parameters and instructions to follow so as to achieve the desired results. As a consequence, there's plenty of the good old trial and error in the synthesis of materials, and even those process parameters that can, to some extent, be predicted are often adjusted empirically. Somehow, synthesizing resembles cooking: you find some working recipe, change it to suit your needs, i.e., the ingredients and the kitchen appliances that you have, cook something, taste it, and repeat if necessary.
  • And last, but not least: it is not enough to just synthesize something; you have to analyze the products in order to find out exactly what you've made.

Thus, only a part of this course is actually about the synthesis methods and the sample preparation for subsequent analysis. The rest is devoted to various analytical techniques: powder X-ray diffraction and phase analysis, particle size analysis, scanning electron microscopy, and thermoanalytical methods (thermogravimetry and thermodilatometry).

Warning

This website is under construction. Although the URLs of some of its pages may change in time, the URL of the main page (which is this one) should stay the same.