TY - JOUR UR - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ces.2018.06.046 SN - 1873-4405 JF - Chemical Engineering Science A1 - Agunloye, E A1 - Panariello, L A1 - Gavriilidis, A A1 - Mazzei, L SP - 318 VL - 191 N1 - This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article?s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ N2 - This paper presents a new model for predicting the evolution of the particle size of gold nanoparticles (GNPs) in the citrate synthesis method. In this method, the precursor is an acid solution of tetrachloroauric acid, while the reducing agent is a base solution of sodium citrate. The acid-base properties of the solutions influence how the size of the particles evolves during the synthesis. In the literature, various mechanistic theories have been proposed to explain this evolution. Turkevich et al. (1951), who pioneered this synthesis method, suggested the ?organizer theory?. This mechanistic description of the synthesis was modelled by Kumar et al. (2007), but recently Agunloye et al. (2017) showed that in several cases this model performed poorly, since it does not account for the acid-base properties of the reactants. In this work, we present a kinetic model based on the synthesis seed-mediated mechanistic description proposed by Wuithschick et al. (2015). In this description, the precursor concurrently reduces into gold atoms and hydroxylates into a passive form. The gold atoms then aggregate into seed particles, which finally react with the passive form of the precursor in a growth step. We validated the model using experimental data from the literature obtained for conditions in which the seed-mediated mechanism is valid. The predicted GNP final sizes closely agree with those obtained experimentally. ID - discovery10061502 PB - PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD KW - Science & Technology KW - Technology KW - Engineering KW - Chemical KW - Engineering KW - Gold nanoparticles KW - Citrate reduction method KW - Seed-mediated mechanism KW - Turkevich organizer theory KW - Population balance modelling KW - SIZE KW - CATALYSIS KW - REDUCTION KW - NANOCRYSTALS KW - MECHANISM TI - A model for the formation of gold nanoparticles in the citrate synthesis method Y1 - 2018/12/14/ AV - public EP - 331 ER -