Sometimes it is difficult to differentiate isolated and agglomerated nanoparticles. Ultrasonic is helpful to isolate agglomerated nanoparticles. Practically it is difficult to isolate the fused particles.
Dear N. Venkatathri,
Isolated nanoparticles have a high monodispersity index whereas agglomerated nanoparticles have a high polydispersity index, this index you can get from the DLS evaluation.
But if you wanna have a visible clearificatin you can always go for TEM analysis. It will help you out in differentiating between the isolated and agglomerated nanoparticles !!
Best of Luck !!
Nanoparticles agglomerate to reduce surface energy,
lowering [conc] and sonicating is definitely the easiest thing to do,
another method would be to surface functionalize the nanoparticles (either with polymer brush and/or with charge) the steric/charge interactions between nanoparticles will cause them to "space out".
For a particle to be stable they are expected to be in a lower energy state. Nanoparticles are however in a metastable state. Therefore in order to increase their stability they tend to come close to each other and reduce their energy (which is termed as agglomeration). Agglomeration could be seen as a cluster of nanoparticles together until it retains the property.
Isolation of a single nanoparticle is difficult. Even Ultrasonication only helps to break a bigger cluster of nanoparticle into a smaller cluster.
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