Ultra-light-weight microwave X-band EMI shielding or RAM material made from sustainable pyrolysed cork templates.

Cork is a renewable and sustainable material, highly porous and lightweight. We valorised waste cork and recycled wine stoppers to make pyrolysed/carbonised solid cork, for use as economic and sustainable microwave (MW) absorbers at the microwave X-band (8-12 GHz), without binder or additives. Although cork is already a very lightweight material (0.

Robocasting of 3D printed and sintered ceria scaffold structures with hierarchical porosity for solar thermochemical fuel production from the splitting of CO.

We report the first ever robocast (additive manufacturing/3D printing) sintered ceria scaffolds, and explore their use for the production of renewable fuels solar thermochemical fuel production (STFP, water and carbon dioxide splitting using concentrated solar energy). CeO catalyst scaffolds were fabricated as 50 mm diameter discs (struts and voids ∼500 μm), sintered at 1450 °C, with specific surface area of 1.58 m g.

Unravelling the Affinity of Alkali-Activated Fly Ash Cubic Foams towards Heavy Metals Sorption.

In this work, alkali-activated fly ash-derived foams were produced at room temperature by direct foaming using aluminum powder. The 1 cm foams (cubes) were then evaluated as adsorbents to extract heavy metals from aqueous solutions. The foams' selectivity towards lead, cadmium, zinc, and copper ions was evaluated in single, binary, and multicomponent ionic solutions.

Pseudocapacitive behaviour in sol-gel derived electrochromic titania nanostructures.

Nanostructured thin films are widely investigated for application in multifunctional devices thanks to their peculiar optoelectronic properties. In this work anatase TiO nanoparticles (average diameter 10 nm) synthesised by a green aqueous sol-gel route are exploited to fabricate optically active electrodes for pseudocapacitive-electrochromic devices. In our approach, highly transparent and homogeneous thin films having a good electronic coupling between nanoparticles are prepared.

Highly efficient lead extraction from aqueous solutions using inorganic polymer foams derived from biomass fly ash and metakaolin.

This work reports a simple and safe, but powerful, route to depollute lead-containing aqueous solutions. Inorganic polymer foams (cm-size) were used as bulk-type adsorbents. The influence of the specimens' porosity and activator molarity on the foams' physical properties and on their lead extraction ability was studied.