Experimental studies on irreversibility of electrostatic adsorption of silica nanoparticles at solid–liquid interface

• We study the irreversibility of electrostatic adsorption of colloid nanoparticles.
• Ag@SiO2 core/shell nanoparticles were used as label particles.
• SEM characterization provides direct proof for irreversible adsorption.

Adsorption of colloidal nanoparticles (NPs) at solid–liquid interface is a scientifically interesting and technologically important phenomenon due to its fundamental importance in many industrial, environmental, and biological processes, such as wastewater treatment, printing, coating of surfaces, chromatography, papermaking, or biocompatibility. The process is well understood theoretically by the random sequential adsorption (RSA) model, based on the assumption of irreversible adsorption. Irreversible adsorption is defined as a process in which, once adsorbed, a particle can neither desorb, nor to move laterally on the surface. However, published experimental data that verifies the irreversibility of particle adsorption are very limited. In this study, we demonstrate the irreversibility of electrostatically driven nanoparticle adsorption utilizing a carefully selected set of experiments. A simple method was employed by uniquely introducing Ag@SiO2 core/shell NPs to perform exchange adsorptions experiments. Stöber SiO2 NPs with a diameter of 50–80 nm were initially electrostatically adsorbed onto amino-functionalized silicon wafer substrates followed by the subsequent adsorption of Ag@SiO2 NPs. The Ag@SiO2 NPs have the same surface chemistry as the neat SiO2 NPs. For the second step the adsorption time was varied from 1 min to 1 week so as to get a thorough understanding of the process irreversibility. Surface coverage quantification has shown that the surface coverage of the initially adsorbed SiO2 NPs stays the same independent of the duration of the second step adsorption using the Ag@SiO2 core/shell NPs. This observation directly confirms the irreversibility of electrostatic adsorption of NPs.

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