Nanocrystals improve quantum dot manufacturing for process monitoring applications

North Carolina State University researchers have developed a system for synthesizing perovskite quantum dots to reduce manufacturing costs for real-time process monitoring to help ensure quality control.

By Matt Shipman March 27, 2019

North Carolina State University researchers have developed a microfluidic system for synthesizing perovskite quantum dots across the entire spectrum of visible light. The system is designed to reduce manufacturing costs and can be tuned on demand to any color and allows for real-time process monitoring to ensure quality control.

Colloidal semiconductor nanocrystals, known as quantum dots (QDs), have been used in applications ranging from biological sensing and imaging to LED displays and solar energy harvesting. The new system can be used to continuously manufacture high-quality QDs for these applications.

“We call this system the Nanocrystal (NC) Factory, and it builds on the NanoRobo microfluidic platform that we unveiled in 2017,” said Milad Abolhasani, an assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at NC State and corresponding author of a paper on the work.

“Not only can we create the QDs in any color using a continuous manufacturing approach, but the NC Factory system is highly modular,” Abolhasani said. “This means that, coupled with continuous process monitoring, the system allows modifications to be made as needed to eliminate the batch-to-batch variation that can be a significant problem for conventional QD manufacturing techniques. Additionally, the chemistry we have developed in this work allows the perovskite QD processing to take place at room temperature.”

The fluorescence color of QDs is a result of the chemical composition, size, and the way the nanocrystals are processed. The original QD synthesis strategy allowed for room temperature synthesis of green-emitting perovskite QDs, which are made using cesium lead bromide. The process starts with cesium lead bromide perovskite QDs and then introduces various halide salts to precisely tune their fluorescence color across the entire spectrum of visible light. Anions in these salts replace the bromine atoms in the green-emitting dots with either iodine atoms (to move toward the red end of the spectrum) or chlorine atoms (to move toward blue; see image).

“Because the NC Factory can precisely control both chemical composition and processing parameters, it can be used to continuously manufacture perovskite quantum dots in any color with the highest quality,” Abolhasani said.

The NC Factory system consists of three plug and play modules. The researchers developed a pre-mixing module to expedite the mixing of halide salts and quantum dots, in order to improve product quality. The system also incorporates a velocity sensor that allows users to monitor reaction times accurately. The synthesized QDs are then monitored in situ using the NanoRobo process-monitoring module.

“From a scientific standpoint, the NC Factory system allowed us to discover that this halide exchange process takes place in three stages,” Abolhasani said. “That’s very important for better understanding the reaction mechanism. But the system can also impact practical issues related to quantum dot applications and manufacturing.”

For example, perovskite quantum dots are attractive to the solar power industry for their efficiency, but they are still too expensive to be adopted on a large scale. Over half of that cost is attributed to manufacturing labor.

“The NC Factory system would require far less labor to operate continuously,” Abolhasani said. “We estimate that the system could cut overall manufacturing costs by at least 50 percent. It should reduce manufacturing costs of QDs for any application and should at least preserve – if not improve – the quality of the quantum dots.”

Matt Shipman, research communications lead, North Carolina State University. Edited by Chris Vavra, production editor, Control Engineering, CFE Media, cvavra@cfemedia.com.

ONLINE extra

Click here to read the research paper “Facile Room-Temperature Anion Exchange Reactions of Inorganic Perovskite Quantum Dots Enabled by a Modular Microfluidic Platform.


Author Bio: Matt Shipman, research communications lead, North Carolina State University