Evaluation of biomass-derived stabilising agents for colloidal silver nanoparticles via nanoparticle tracking analysis (NTA)

Nanoparticle Tracking Analysis (NTA), developed by NanoSight, has been proved to be a highly useful, simple and efficient characterisation tool to differentiate between the capping efficiencies of various biomass-derived stabilising agents (e.g. starch, alginic acid and waste-derived hemicellulosic syrup) of aqueous colloidal silver suspensions. The results indicated that the use of a complex biorefinery-derived hemicellulosic syrup containing a mixture of C-5 and C-6 sugars, as well as oligomers, provided comparable capping and stabilisation properties to those of the most efficient pure polysaccharides including alginic acid. These findings illustrate the potential of waste-derived feedstocks for the stabilisation of nanoparticles in solution.