TY - CONF A1 - Knigge, Xenia A1 - Valsami-Jones, E. A1 - Hodoroaba, Vasile-Dan A1 - Radnik, Jörg T1 - Complementary Analysis of Sterilized Nanoparticles with SEM/EDS And XPS/HAXPES N2 - Since there is a lack of knowledge about the effects of nanomaterials on human health and the environment, and in order to get safe- and sustainable-by-design nanomaterials, it is necessary to find an easy way to assess their properties, without having to perform time-consuming experiments each time. In the European project NanoSolveIT, the behavior of nanoparticles is to be derived from a nanomaterial fingerprint database with standardized physico-chemical properties of nanomaterials. The key element for these grouping and reading across approaches is the collection of standardized information about nanomaterials in combination with modelling and simulations. As parameters the particle size, particle shape, chemical composition and surface chemistry are discussed here. Measurements of the shape and size were performed using scanning electron microscopy (SEM). For the chemical composition energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS) and for the surface chemistry X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) were used. As an additional method hard X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (HAXPES) with a higher information depth than XPS was used, thus we were able to include information not only from the top surface, but also from deeper regions of about 30 nm. Therefore, this method is complementary to EDS. All these methods have been correlatively used to study nanoparticles of different chemical composition that have been treated differently by sterilization. Such a sterilization step is common, before testing for toxicity. To date, the sterilization step has not been considered in establishing the structure-activity relationship of the nanomaterial. The effects of sterilization are discussed on exemplary samples. The results demonstrate the influence of sterilization on all investigated properties, indicating a restructuring of the nanoparticles. This implies that samples that have been sterilized after synthesis, may show different toxicity from those used in applications without a sterilization step. Acknowledgement: This research is part of the project “NanoSolveIT”, which has received funding from European Union Horizon 2020 Programme (H2020) under grant agreement no 814572. (https://nanosolveit.eu/) T2 - nanoSAFE'23 CY - Grenoble, France DA - 04.06.2023 KW - XPS KW - HAXPES KW - Characterization KW - Nanoparticles KW - NanoSolveIT PY - 2023 AN - OPUS4-57658 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER -