Chemical Optimization for Functional Ligament Tissue Engineering.

Electrospun materials are widely used for functional tissue engineering for its robust production and biomimetic properties. Several issues persist, however, including heterogeneous cell distribution, insufficient matrix elaboration/accumulation, and limited construct size. We took three synergistic approaches to address these issues by modifying the chemical microenvironment for the seeded cells.

Photoelectric characteristics of natural pigments self-assembly fabricated on TiO2/FTO substrate.

Natural pigment can act as an inexpensive and biologically-friendly dye, which is fabricated on a TiO2/FTO substrate. Natural pigments promote the efficiency of the photoelectric conversion in water-based DSSC with the aqueous electrolyte of the Ce+4/+3 system. The open-circuit voltage (Voc) of natural pigment in water-based DSSC is 0.

Morphology-controlled 2D ordered microstructure arrays by surface modification of colloidal template.

In this paper, we describe a convenient approach for fabricating two-dimensional, ordered TiO2 bowl-like structure and inverted-bowl-like structure patterns consisting of submicrometer arrays on a self-assembled monolayer film, for the first time using a surface-modified polystyrene colloidal monolayer as the template. Typically, the well-ordered two-dimensional TiO2 bowl-like structures were obtained by liquid phase deposition within the interstitial voids in assemblies of polystyrene spheres followed by the dissolution of the polystyrene template with dichloromethane. Otherwise, through a simple wet treatment by immersing in the sulfuric acid at 50 degrees C, the surface characteristics of polystyrene were turned from hydrophobic to hydrophilic.

Fabrication of aligned TiO2 one-dimensional nanostructured arrays using a one-step templating solution approach.

In this letter, we report a one-step templating synthetic strategy to prepare aligned TiO2 nanotube and nanowire arrays on Si substrate from a solution at ambient temperature. The deposition of TiO2 and the selective-etching of the ZnO template proceeded at the same time through the careful control of process parameters. The different thickness of TiO2 sheaths, leading to the formation of nanotubes or nanorods, can be precisely controlled by the deposition time.

Influence of humidity on the fabrication of high-quality colloidal crystals via a capillary-enhanced process.

Three-dimensional colloidal crystals have attracted a great deal of attention because of their potential use in photonic crystal, sensors, and other applications, but the bottlenecks in fabricating colloidal crystals include longer processing time and the lack of large-area ordered samples. A proposed capillary-enhanced method, which is a novel, efficient process for fabricating high-quality colloidal crystals in 24 h, is reported. It is necessary for increasing the processing rate by elevating the evaporation temperature but commonly resulted in the deposition of less-ordered crystals.