Study on the formation mechanism of cerium oxalate nanoparticles from the coupling route of homogeneous precipitation with microemulsion

To study the formation mechanism of cerium oxalate nanoparticles from the coupling route of homogeneous precipitation with Np-9/heptanol/octane/water microemulsion, the diameter of water droplets of the microemulsion was measured by dynamic light scattering (DLS); the variation of the concentration of methyl oxalate during the precipitation reaction was determined by titration; the average size of cerium oxalate nanoparticles was calculated according to the diffusion mechanism and compared with the experimental value. The experimental size of cerium oxalate nanoparticles was 2∼10 times bigger than the calculated one, which showed that the formation of nanoparticles mainly followed the collision-coalescence-split mechanism.