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Photothermal Heating of Au Nanorods and Nanospheres: Temperature Characteristics and Strength of Convective Forces

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Abstract

The nanoscale photothermal effect and the optofluidic convection around plasmonic nanoparticles drive the application of such nanoparticles in micro-environment. In this work, heat transfer and fluid flow around Au nanospheres and nanorods in water medium under continuous and pulsed wave laser irradiance was investigated using an FEM based numerical framework. Au nanospheres of a wide range of diameter: 40 nm ≤ Diameter (D) ≤ 180 nm and relatively large nanorods (diameter: 50 nm) with varying aspect ratio (1 ≤ Aspect ratio (A) ≤ 5) and orientation (0° ≤ θ ≤ 90°, ϕ = 0°, 90°) with respect to the incident EM radiation were investigated for continuous wave (CW) and pulsed wave laser. It was found that although nanorods can attain much higher temperature than nanospheres, orientation of a nanorod is an important factor to be carefully considered in applications. In micro-scale spherical and hemispherical confinements (diameter < 14.4 μm), the convective velocity fields around nanoparticles is in the order of 10–9 m/s, with only a weak effect of the slip or no-slip boundary condition on the confining walls. Importantly, the size of the confinement has a strong effect leading to an order of magnitude stronger convection for 14.4 μm (diameter) spherical confinement as compared to 3.6 μm confinement. Additionally close proximity of the nanoparticles to the confining walls strongly reduces (by an order of magnitude) the convective currents. The results reported herein provides important insights for the use of photothermal nanoparticles in microscale confined space (e.g. cellular environment) for applications such as optical tweezers, photoporation, etc.

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Acknowledgements

We extend our gratitude to TIGP (Taiwan International Graduate Program) for the financial assistance. We also thank Department of Engineering and System Sciences, NTHU for all the resources.

Funding

The research stay for this work was funded by TIGP (Taiwan International Graduate Program).

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  1. Rituraj Borah and Ashish Kumar contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Bioscience Engineering, Universiteit Antwerpen, Campus Groenenborger, Groenenborgerlaan 171, 2020, Antwerpen, Belgium

    Rituraj Borah

  2. Department of Chemical Engineering, National Institute of Technology Rourkela, Rourkela, Odisha, 769008, India

    Rituraj Borah, Millen Samantaray & Anusha Desai

  3. Department of Engineering and System Science, National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu, 30013, Taiwan

    Rituraj Borah, Ashish Kumar & Fan-Gang Tseng

  4. Research Center for Applied Sciences Academia Sinica, Taipei, 11529, Taiwan

    Fan-Gang Tseng

  5. Frontier Research Center On Fundamental and Applied Sciences of Matters, National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu, 30013, Taiwan

    Fan-Gang Tseng

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Contributions

R. B. and A.K. contributed equally to this work in conceiving the work, obtaining the results, validation of the models and writing of the manuscript. M. S. and A. D. contributed to the writing and the validation. F. G. supervised the work. All authors reviewed the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Rituraj Borah or Fan-Gang Tseng.

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11468_2023_1855_MOESM1_ESM.docx

Supplementary file1 The supporting document contains reproduction of benchmark results in previous works for the validation of the present numerical framework. Additionally, the results of the domain independence test, grid independence test and time-step independence are also included in the supporting information. (DOCX 2299 KB)

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Borah, R., Kumar, A., Samantaray, M. et al. Photothermal Heating of Au Nanorods and Nanospheres: Temperature Characteristics and Strength of Convective Forces. Plasmonics 18, 1449–1465 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11468-023-01855-4

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