A Brief Overview on Ferrite (Fe3O4) Based Polymeric Nanocomposites: Recent Developments and Challenges

In this article, we have mainly discussed about ferrite (Fe3O4) and its polymer based nanocomposites. Ferrite particles have become an important research material because of their vast applications in the field of biotechnology, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and data storage. It has been observed that ferrite Fe3O4 particles show best performance for size less than 10-30 nm. This happens due to the super paramagnetic nature of such particles. In super paramagnetic range these particles exhibit zero remanence or coercivity. Therefore, various properties of ferrite (Fe3O4) nanoparticles and its polymer nanocomposites are very much dependent on the size, and distribution of the particles in the polymeric matrix. Moreover, it has been also observed that the shape of the nanocrystals plays important role in the determination of their fundamental properties. These particles show instability over longer times due to the formation of agglomerates generated by high surface energies. Therefore, protection strategies such as grafting and coatings with silica/carbon or polymers have been developed to stabilize them chemically. Recently, silylation technique is mainly used for the modification of nanoparticles. Experimentally, it has been observed that nanocomposites composed of polymer matrices and ferrite showed substantial improvements in stiffness, fracture toughness, sensing ability (magnetic as well as electric), impact energy absorption, and electro-catalytic activities to bio-species

Dynamics of Solvation and Rotational Relaxation of Coumarin 480 in Pure Aqueous-AOT Reverse Micelle and Reverse Micelle Containing Different-Sized Silver Nanoparticles Inside Its Core: A Comparative Study

In this work, we have synthesized different-sized silver nanoparticles in an aqueous-AOT reverse micellar system under the same condition by choosing different reduction processes. We chose two different reducing agents, glucose (mild) and sodium borohydride (strong). In the glucose reduction process, we obtained smaller size nanoparticles in comparison to the nanoparticles obtained in the borohydride reduction process under the same condition. Solvation dynamics study showed that reverse micellar aggregated structures were present after the nanoparticles' formation in a perturbed state. Nanoparticles inside the reverse micellar core were responsible for this perturbation. Larger size nanoparticles were triggering larger perturbation than the smaller size nanoparticles. These changes in perturbation were also reflected clearly in solvation dynamics and rotational relaxation measurements