Hierarchical Nanoporous BiVO Photoanodes with High Charge Separation and Transport Efficiency for Water Oxidation.

To fabricate high efficiency photoanodes for water oxidation, it is highly required to engineer their nanoporous architecture and interface to improve the charge separation and transport efficiency. By focusing on this aspect, we developed hierarchical nanoporous BiVO (BV) from solution processed two-dimensional BiOI (BI) crystals. The orientation of the BI crystals was controlled by changing the solvent volume ratios of ethylene glycol (EG) to ethanol (ET), which resulted in different hierarchical and planar BV morphologies through a chemical treatment followed by thermal heating.

Anti-biofilm activity and food packaging application of room temperature solution process based polyethylene glycol capped Ag-ZnO-graphene nanocomposite.

Present work reports on synthesis and anti-biofilm activity as well as food packaging application of Ag-ZnO-reduce graphene oxide (rGO)-polyethylene glycol (PEG) (AZGP) nanocomposites via adopting room temperature solution process by varying silver nitrate content (up to 0.1 M) with fixed content of graphene oxide and PEG used in the precursors. Presence of Ag and ZnO nanoparticles (NPs) distributed uniformly over rGO nanosheets has been confirmed by X-ray diffraction and transmission electron microscopic analyses whereas FTIR, Raman, UV-Visible and X-ray photoelectron spectral studies have been performed to confirm the existence of chemical interaction/complexation that happened between the available oxygen functionalities of rGO and PEG with the inorganic moieties (Ag-ZnO/Zn) of AZGP samples.

Hierarchically Structured Macro with Nested Mesoporous Zinc Indium Oxide Conducting Film.

Fabrication of homogeneously distributed (HD) macropores by breath figure process is an active research area. Adopting the process, for the first time, we report the fabrication of HD macro with nested meso (hierarchical) porous nanocrystalline zinc indium oxide conducting sol-gel thin film on glass by dip-coating at 45-50% room relative humidity (RH) from a solution in ethanol-2-butanol (1:1, w/w) medium with a 1:1, Zn:In ratio. In this process, solution composition and RH are found to play key roles on HD macropore generation.

Sol-Gel-Based Titania-Silica Thin Film Overlay for Long Period Fiber Grating-Based Biosensors.

An evanescent wave optical fiber biosensor based on titania-silica-coated long period grating (LPG) is presented. The chemical overlay, which increases the refractive index (RI) sensitivity of the sensor, consists of a sol-gel-based titania-silica thin film, deposited along the sensing portion of the fiber by means of the dip-coating technique. Changing both the sol viscosity and the withdrawal speed during the dip-coating made it possible to adjust the thickness of the film overlay, which is a crucial parameter for the sensor performance.

ZnSe colloidal nanoparticles synthesized by solvothermal method in the presence of ZrCl4.

The nanocrystalline ZnSe was synthesized from precursors of zinc acetate and Se powder in a high boiling trioctylphosphine (TOP), oleic acid, and ZrCl(4) by solvothermal method. The produced ZnSe nanoparticles showed gradual absorption edge shifting towards blue wavelength region as well as transformation of crystal phase from cubic to hexagonal with increasing ZrCl(4) concentrations in precursor solutions. The particle size calculated from XRD measurements for ZnSe nanoparticles was decreased with increasing ZrCl(4) concentrations for a reaction time of 240 min, from 6.

Ligand-dependent particle size control of PbSe quantum dots.

Colloidal solutions of monodisperse PbSe quantum dots (QDs) were synthesized by a hot solution chemical method from a reaction mixture of lead oleate and TOPSe (TOP: tri-n-octylphosphine). The synthesis was carried out at a fixed temperature (170 degrees C) and time, while the particle sizes of the PbSe QDs were controlled by using two different kinds of organic ligands with varied chain length. It was seen that the tuning of PbSe QDs are possible by using the proper molar ratio of the co-ligands, such as acetic acid or hexanoic acid, at a fixed reaction temperature and time, verified by TEM and XRD as well as NIR absorption analysis.