Salt-Assisted Ultrasonic Deaggregation of Nanodiamond.

We report a new facile, inexpensive, and contaminant-free technique of salt-assisted ultrasonic deaggregation (SAUD) of nanodiamond into single-digit particles stable in aqueous colloidal solution in a wide pH range. The technique utilizes the energy of ultrasound to break apart nanodiamond aggregates in sodium chloride aqueous slurry. In contrast to current deaggregation techniques, which introduce zirconia contaminants into nanodiamond, the single-digit nanodiamond colloids produced by SAUD have no toxic or difficult-to-remove impurities and are therefore well-suited to produce nanodiamonds for numerous applications, including theranostics, composites, and lubrication, etc. Requiring only aqueous slurry of sodium chloride and standard horn sonicator, and yielding highly pure well-dispersed nanodiamond colloids, the technique is an attractive alternative to current nanodiamond deaggregation protocols and can be easily implemented in any laboratory or scaled up for industrial use.