Reactivity and chemical processing properties of barium titanate nanoparticles for electrospinning

The knowledge-based design of engineered nanostructures that preserve the unique properties of the individual building blocks is an important prerequisite for both, basic research in the physical chemistry of materials and the manufacture of advanced materials with unprecedented properties. BaTiO₃ (BTO) is a wildly investigated perovskite material that shows exceptional properties such as ferroelectricity. This makes the material well suited for different electronic applications like random access memories, sensors, or composites. However, the chemical stability of BTO in water relates to important processes in material engineering for the production of multi-layer capacitors and, for this reason, requires detailed chemical analysis.
In this study, 1-dimensional BTO nanostructures are formulated using the electrospinning technique, which represents a simple but very versatile method to prepare nanofibers. We synthesized the BTO powder via a flame spray pyrolysis approach (FSP) and prepared the electrospinning precursor by dispersing the BTO nanoparticle powder in an aqueous polymer solution. Structural investigations using X-ray diffraction and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) for the BTO samples revealed large crystalline micrometer-sized and morphologically well-defined rods after powder contact with aqueous polymer dispersion. On the basis of a detailed analysis of materials and processes, we propose a formation pathway that explains the emergence of the new type of particles and discuss reactivity issues related to vapor phase grown BTO nanostructures.