Effect of Particle Shape on Neck Growth and Shrinkage of Nanoparticles

Sintering of nanoparticles to create films and patterns of functional materials is emerging as a key manufacturing process in applications like flexible electronics, solar cells and thin-film devices. Further, there is the emerging potential to use nanoparticle sintering to perform additive manufacturing as well. While the effect of nanoparticle size on sintering has been well studied, very little attention has been paid to the effect of nanoparticle shape on the evolution of sintering. This paper uses Molecular dynamics (MD) simulations to determine the influence of particle shape on shrinkage and neck growth for two common nanoparticle shape combinations, i.e., sphere-sphere and sphere-cylinder nanoparticles of different sizes. These sintering indicators are examined at two different temperature ramps. The results from this work show that depending on their relative sizes, degree of neck growth and shrinkage are both significantly affected by the nanoparticle shape. The possibility of using this phenomenon to control density and stresses during nanoparticle sintering are discussed.