Synthesis of Nanomaterials

Having established what makes nanoparticles behave differently from bulk material (Section 16.6), the chapter turns to how nanomaterials are actually made and studied. There are two broad approaches to synthesising nanomaterials -- bottom-up and top-down (Fig 16.6, already introduced in Section 16.6.2) -- covered in Section 16.7.1, followed by a specific worked method, the sol-gel process, used for wet-chemical synthesis of nanomaterials (Section 16.7.2), a survey of the analytical techniques used to characterise synthesised nanomaterials once th …