The well dispersed metal nanoparticles on substrate can present enhanced properties and the preparation of designed nanoparticle thin film is a hot topic in material science [1]. Especially, for the large scale industrial production like roll to roll and inkjet printing of functional nanoparticles, the controlled fast solvent evaporation and designed homogeneous structure is preferred. However, inhomogeneous material dispersion for example, coffee-stain-like or clumps of nanoparticles is observed in the dried thin film [2]. To overcome this obstacle, controlling the solution evaporation and promoting the ordering of nanoparticles on the templated substrates is a smart and feasible choice. Spray deposition is one of the desirable techniques to manipulate solvent evaporation by atomizing the solution [3, 4]. It offers a fast and economic deposition of organic/inorganic-based nanoparticles showing high structural uniformity over large areas and is thus of great interest in industrial applications. Here we present our recent in situ studies on the directed assembly of spray deposited gold nanoparticles on patterned polymer substrates. By manipulating the assembly process, we compared the optical properties of the as-prepared gold nanoparticle thin films. These findings are attractive for the applications such as solar cells and antireflection coatings.

Poster presented at the 16th International Conference on Small-Angle Scattering, held on 13-18th September, 2015, Berlin (Germany).