North Carolina State University researchers have developed a microfluidic system for synthesizing perovskite quantum dots across the entire spectrum of visible light. The system drastically reduces manufacturing costs, can be tuned on demand to any color and allows for real-time process monitoring to ensure quality control.
Over the last two decades, colloidal semiconductor nanocrystals, known as quantum dots (QDs), have emerged as novel materials for 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 use in these applications.
"We call this system the Nanocrystal (NC) Factory, and it builds on the NanoRobo microfluidic platform that we unveiled in 2017," says 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 says. "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."
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