Modeling the Growth of Salt Nano-Wires*

The purpose of our research has been to successfully model the growth of NaCl nano-wires from a supra-molecular gel. The interest in these wires is the ease of growth and the potential application of integrating them into electrical circuitry. Our model is based off of diffusion driven crystal formation through evaporation. We used two different crystallization constants to represent the overall mass-transfer rate of the process. The first crystallization constant is a reaction constant; this is present during the initial formation of the seed crystals directly below the gels surface. The second constant is the diffusion crystallization constant. The first constant is taken to be at its maximum before it deforms the gel. This is calculated from the salt mass ratio the gel in which the gel is deformed in the initial growth phase. While the second constant is derived from the supporting material. The main two parameters that we are observing are the height of the wires and width of the wires, where we see experimentally a maximum width of 5.64 Angstroms, which is the reported width of a single NaCl crystal lattice.