Polymeric materials are widely used in industry due to their ease of production, lightweight and ductile nature. A very effective approach to improve mechanical properties of polymer is to add fibers, whiskers, platelets or particles as reinforcements to the polymer matrix. The polymer nanoparticles show enhanced properties after the incorporation of low amount of Nano fillers such as carbon black (CB), carbon nanotubes(CNTs), graphene and Nano clay (Huang, 2002, Moniruzzaman et al. 2006, Kim et al. 2010,Fischer, 2003). Polymers have been filled with several inorganic compounds, either synthetic or natural, in order to increase heat and impact resistance, flame retardancy and mechanical strength, and to decrease electrical conductivity and gas permeability with respect to oxygen and water vapor (Hajji et al. 1999). Such composites are widely used in many areas like in electronics, catalysis, transportations and construction, because of their novel properties. Compared to conventional composite nanoparticles, polymer nanocomposites have ultrafine nanometer size phase dimensions and offer unique combination of properties due to the size (Sanchez et al. 2000, Sanchez et al. 1999, Pomogilo, 2000, Novak, 1993, Lichtenha et al. 2001, Sanchez et al. 1994, Ells et al. 1999, Kwiatko et al. 2000, Schubert et al. 1995, Mori Kawa et al. 1992, Giannelis et al. 1999, Jordan et al. 2005). The properties of polymers can be improved by doping with metal nanopartilces (Akita et al. 1999, 1999, 1999, Chang et al. 2002, Zavyalov et al. 2002). Another important aspect of nanoscale reinforcement is that it has exceptional potential to generate new phenomena giving rise to special properties in these materials. Urea- Formaldehyde (UF) resin is widely used as thermosetting materials due to low cost and good thermal and mechanical properties including chemical resistance. This resin, which is the condensation product of urea and formaldehyde, are used with reinforcing fillers or fibers to produce composite materials for use in a wide range of commodity, engineering and other special applications. Several preparative methods of composite particles of polymer and magnetite particles he been proposed ( Ma et al. 2005) like suspension polymerization (Horak et al. 2010), dispersion polymerization (Pimpha et al. 2015), emulsion polymerization (Wang et al. 2005) soap-free emulsion polymerization (Mori et al. 2007) mini emulsion polymerization (Liu et al. 2003) and micro emulsion polymerization (Chaudhary et al. 2017). All these methods of nanoparticle formation require high temperature and expensive instruments. One of the simplest and cost effective techniques to prepare the silver and nickel nanoparticles is by thermal decomposition. This technique has various advantages over other method. These include a reaction that can be easily controlled requiring short reaction time for the preparation of different type of nanoparticles (Traversa et al. 1998, Farhadiet al. 2010).
Amongst the metal nanoparticles, Ag NP is becoming an increasingly important material in many technologies. Ag NPs exhibit the highest efficiency of Plasmon excitation and is the only material whose Plasmon resonance can be tuned to any wavelength in the visible spectrum. Ni NPs have also been getting importance because of its application as catalysts and conducting and magnetic materials (Kulkarni, 2015). The objective of this study has been to synthesize silver and nickel nanoparticle by using urea and formaldehyde resin as precursors, followed by thermal decomposition. The synthesized nanoparticles have been characterized using Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM), Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM) and Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM).