Manufacturing of nanostructured materials and functional devices offers many exciting opportunities for substantial contribution in renewable energy utilization, environmental compliance, and product development. In the past two decades, gas-phase flame synthesis has not only proved to be one of the most scalable and economical technologies for producing well-controlled nanostructured materials, including single metal-oxide, mixed-oxide nanocomposite, and carbon nanostructures, but also has been recognized as robust fabrication method of nano-devices. In this paper, we focus our review mainly on the recent trends in specific applications of flame aerosol synthesis in the last decade, e.g., (a) usage of a substrate in stagnation geometry with controlled particle temperature-time history, (b) application of external fields to control particle characteristics, (c) development of advanced spray technique for doping synthesis of nanocomposites of multicomponent metal oxides or carbon-metal oxides, and (d) fabrication of nanomaterial-based functional devices. For the possibility to improve the design and operation of flame aerosol reactors, we summarize recent advances in: (i) in situ optical diagnostics for either gas phase or particle phase in flame field; (ii) multi-scale modeling and simulation employing gas-phase chemistry, population balance method, molecular dynamics and nanoscale particle dynamics.

Publication: Li SQ*, Ren YH, Biswas P, Tse SD. Flame aerosol synthesis of nanostructured materials and functional devices: Processing, modeling, and diagnostics.  Progress in Energy and Combustion Science, 55, pp.1-59 (2016).