Al2O3/SnO2Co-nanoparticle modified grafted collagen for improving thermal stability and infrared emissivity

Al2O3/SnO2 co-nanoparticles were prepared with a modified sol-gel technique followed by a thermal treatment process. With these co-nanoparticles the grafted collagen-Al2O3/SnO2 nanocomposites were obtained using a supersonic dispersion method. X-ray diffraction, FR-IR analysis, transmission electron microscopy, TGA/DTA and infrared emissivity test were performed to characterize the resulting nanoparticles and nanocomposites, respectively. The Al2O3/SnO2 co-nanoparticles showed a narrow distribution of size between 20-40 nm and could be uniformly absorbed on the tri-helix scaffolds of the grafted collagen without any aggregation. The nanocomposites possessed better thermal stability and substantially lower infrared emissivity than the grafted collagen and Al2O3/SnO2 co-nanoparticles with an increase of degradation temperature from 39 to 210 degrees C and a decrease of infrared emissivity from 0.850 of the grafted collagen and 0.708 of the Al2O3/SnO2 co-nanoparticles to 0.424, which provided a potential application of the nanocomposites to areas such as photoelectronics.