In situ transmission electron microscopy study of nanoparticle sintering

The control and the understanding of the sintering process are of utmost scientific and technological importance due to the intrinsic dependence of the characteristic of a a material on its micro/nanostructure. The increasing control of the production of nanoparticles led to new challenges to sintering, especially on the application of classical mass transport models. Taking this into account, in situ characterization techniques have been proposed to investigate physical and chemical processes that occur during sintering. Among those techniques, the in situ transmission electron microscopy (TEM) is an important characterization technique to investigating sintering enabling a direct observation of the phenomena occurring during sintering. In this work the potentiality to the study of CeO₂ nanoparticles by in situ TEM is reported, consisting on the analysis of the densification phenomenon, the crystallographic orientation and the binding species at the nanoparticle surface.

sintering; in situ TEM; cerium dioxide; nanoparticles