Nanoparticles, melting point depression

The melting point decreases considerably when the particle size of materials attains the nanoscale range. Increasing the surface-to-volume ratio affects their thermodynamic and thermal properties. The melting point depression is much lower in the case of nanowires, nanotubes, and nanoparticles than the bulk form of the same materials (Lubick and Betts 2008). 

Recently, we have introduced an entropic model for predicting the miscibility behavior of PS-NP/PS nanocomposites with very good agreement between theory and experiment [8]. Additionally, the theory has been employed for the prediction of the interaction parameter, the miscibility behavior, and the melting point depression of athermal poly(ethylene) (PE)-nanoparticle/linear-PE nanocomposites using chain dimensions data from Monte-Carlo (MC) simulations [9]. Our main findings indicate that dilution of contact, hard sphere-like, nanoparticle-nanoparticle interactions plays a key role in explaining the miscibility behavior of polymer-nanoparticles dispersed in a chemically identical linear-polymer matrfac [8, 9]. 

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