Corrosion Resistance of Sulfur-Selenium Alloy Coatings.

Despite decades of research, metallic corrosion remains a long-standing challenge in many engineering applications. Specifically, designing a material that can resist corrosion both in abiotic as well as biotic environments remains elusive. Here a lightweight sulfur-selenium (S-Se) alloy is designed with high stiffness and ductility that can serve as an excellent corrosion-resistant coating with protection efficiency of ≈99.

Interfacial Engineering to Tailor the Properties of Multifunctional Ultralight Weight hBN-Polymer Composite Aerogels.

A common feature of aerogels is that they are brittle and suffer from poor mechanical properties. The development of high-performance, lightweight, and mechanically robust polymer composite aerogels may find use in a broad range of applications such as packaging, transportation, construction, electronics, and aerospace. Most aerogels are made of ceramic materials, such as silica, alumina, and carbide.

Elucidation of Molybdenum Trioxide Sulfurization: Mechanistic Insights into Two-Dimensional Molybdenum Disulfide Growth.

Powder vaporization is a common method for the generation of large-area, single-crystal, two-dimensional molybdenum disulfide. While commonly employed as a growth method, the fundamental molecular mechanisms are not well understood. Recent ab initio analyses have shown that molybdenum oxysulfide rings play a key role in the sulfurization of molybdenum trioxide from elemental sulfur.

Lithium, sodium and magnesium ion conduction in solid state mixed polymer electrolytes.

Alkali and alkaline earth metal-ion batteries are currently among the most efficient electrochemical energy storage devices. However, their stability and safety performance are greatly limited when used with volatile organic liquid electrolytes. A solid state polymer electrolyte is a prospective solution even though poor ionic conductivity at room temperature remains a bottleneck.

Atomic-Level Alloying of Sulfur and Selenium for Advanced Lithium Batteries.

Li-S batteries are potential candidates to be utilized in next-generation energy storage applications. Though they offer very high theoretical capacity, their poor volumetric energy density as compared to conventional Li-ion batteries and polysulphide dissolution in the electrolyte hinder it to be used in practical application. In this work, we have attempted to solve these issues by creating an alloy of sulfur and selenium by co-melting.

High-K dielectric sulfur-selenium alloys.

Upcoming advancements in flexible technology require mechanically compliant dielectric materials. Current dielectrics have either high dielectric constant, K (e.g.

The Role of Molybdenum Oxysulfide Rings in the Formation of Two-Dimensional Molybdenum Disulfide by Powder Vaporization.

Sulfurization of molybdenum trioxide by elemental sulfur through powder vaporization is a common method used for growth of molybdenum disulfide. Optimization of complexes between sulfur allotropes and molybdenum species using Density Functional Theory has revealed the molecular mechanism of sulfurization. Complete sulfurization of molybdenum trioxide to molybdenum disulfide requires at least three sets of nucleophilic addition-elimination reactions that generate the experimentally observed molybdenum oxysulfide intermediates along the reaction pathway.

Velcro-Inspired SiC Fuzzy Fibers for Aerospace Applications.

The most recent and innovative silicon carbide (SiC) fiber ceramic matrix composites, used for lightweight high-heat engine parts in aerospace applications, are woven, layered, and then surrounded by a SiC ceramic matrix composite (CMC). To further improve both the mechanical properties and thermal and oxidative resistance abilities of this material, SiC nanotubes and nanowires (SiCNT/NWs) are grown on the surface of the SiC fiber via carbon nanotube conversion. This conversion utilizes the shape memory synthesis (SMS) method, starting with carbon nanotube (CNT) growth on the SiC fiber surface, to capitalize on the ease of dense surface morphology optimization and the ability to effectively engineer the CNT-SiC fiber interface to create a secure nanotube-fiber attachment.

Role of Atomic Layer Functionalization in Building Scalable Bottom-Up Assembly of Ultra-Low Density Multifunctional Three-Dimensional Nanostructures.

Building three-dimensional (3D) structures from their constituent zero-, one-, and two-dimensional nanoscale building blocks in a bottom-up assembly is considered the holey grail of nanotechnology. However, fabricating such 3D nanostructures at ambient conditions still remains a challenge. Here, we demonstrate an easily scalable facile method to fabricate 3D nanostructures made up of entirely zero-dimensional silicon dioxide (SiO) nanoparticles.