Investigation of the cluster structure in aqueous suspensions of nanodiamonds by small-angle neutron scattering

Abstract

The paper presents the results of the structural study of various types of the water-detonation nanodiamond liquid systems, which are obtained by small-angle scattering of thermal neutrons. It was shown that in the mass fraction range (0.3 - 1.8) % the experimental spectra are well described by a two-level model of unified exponential/power-law approach. The resulting structural parameters allowed us to estimate the aggregation number in the studied systems. Sizes of the nanodiamond particles and their clusters are found as well as the fractal dimension of the latter.

Keywords

• detonation nanodiamonds
• small-angle neutron scattering
• fractal clusters
• aggregation number