Preparing Silica Aerogel Monoliths via a Rapid Supercritical Extraction Method

Anisotropically structured magnetic aerogel monoliths.

Texturing of magnetic ceramics and composites by aligning and fixing of colloidal particles in a magnetic field is a powerful strategy to induce anisotropic chemical, physical and especially mechanical properties into bulk materials. If porosity could be introduced, anisotropically structured magnetic materials would be the perfect supports for magnetic separations in biotechnology or for magne...

A novel method of preparing metallic Janus silica particles using supercritical carbon dioxide.

In this study, we demonstrate a novel fabrication method to prepare metallic Janus silica particles by embedding nanosized silica particles on a spherical polystyrene (PS) substrate in supercritical carbon dioxide (sc CO2), followed by labelling with gold nanoparticles on the exposed part of the silica colloids. To this end, three main types of Janus particles displaying two distinct surfaces a...

Production of Spherical Aerogel Microparticles by Supercritical Extraction of Emulsion

Due to high surface area, low density, open pore structure and excellent insulation properties aerogels were intensively investigated in the past decades for diverse range of applications. The state of the art of aerogel production by supercritical drying is to produce monolithic aerogel, where the sol is aged in molds and dried by extraction with supercritical CO2. Aerogels in form of spherica...

Structural 3D Characterization of Silica Monoliths: Extraction of Rod Networks

Based on experimental 3D image data, we analyze a highly porous silica monolith consisting of a network of rod-like structures. Because the rods are often hard to recognize even by visual inspection of the image data, a simple binarization with e.g. thresholding techniques is problematic. Therefore we extract a voxel-based skeleton directly from the filtered grayscale image, which is then trans...

Method of Preparing a Composite Polymer and Silica-Based Membrane