A study of nucleation and the early stage of growth of nickel powder from a vapour nickel carbonyl precursor

The phenomenon of nucleation of solid particles from the gas phase has a number of important industrial applications. In this study, the formation of nickel nuclei from the gas phase decomposition of nickel carbonyl has been predicted using classical nucleation theory and compared with experimental results from a hot wall tube reactor. It was shown that the free energy nucleation barrier was much less significant in reality than predicted by …