Many metallic structural and non-structural parts used in the transportation industry can be replaced by textile-reinforced composites. Composites made from a polymeric matrix and fibrous reinforcement have been increasingly studied during the last decade. On the other hand, the fast development of smart textile structures seems to be a very promising solution for in situ structural health moni...

Sol-gel thin films of hydroxyapatite (HA) and titania (TiO(2)) have received a great deal of attention in the area of bioactive surface modification of titanium (Ti) implants. Sol-gel coatings were developed on Ti substrates of pure HA and TiO(2) and two composite forms, HA+10% TiO(2) and HA+20% TiO(2), and the biological properties of the coatings were evaluated. All the coating layers exhibit...

Transparent and electrically conductive composite silica films were fabricated on glass and hydrophilic SiOx/silicon substrates by incorporation of individual graphene oxide sheets into silica sols followed by spin-coating, chemical reduction, and thermal curing. The resulting films were characterized by SEM, AFM, TEM, low-angle X-ray reflectivity, XPS, UV-vis spectroscopy, and electrical condu...

A novel self-cleaning polymer composite with self-healing ability to self-repair after chemical and mechanical damage using readily available materials like polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) and camphor soot particles is developed. With the optimal loading of the camphor soot particles, the composite coating on glass and stainless steel surfaces reveals self-cleaning properties with a water contact a...

The aims of this study were to investigate the effects of two surface-conditioning methods on the shear bond strength (SBS) of metal brackets bonded to three different all-ceramic materials, and to evaluate the mode of failure after debonding. Twenty feldspathic, 20 fluoro-apatite, and 20 leucite-reinforced ceramic specimens were examined following two surface-conditioning methods: air-particle...

A fiber coating from polyaniline (PANI) was electrochemically prepared and employed for Solid phase micreoextraction (SPME). The PANI film was directly electrodeposited on the platinum wire surface using cyclic voltametry (CV) technique. The same method was applied for the preparation of SPME fiber coated by polyaniline multiwalled carbon nanotubes (PANI/MWCNTs) composite. The concentration of ...

In developing new generations of coatings for medical devices and tissue engineering scaffolds, there is a need for thin coatings that provide controlled sequential release of multiple therapeutics while providing a tunable approach to time dependence and the potential for sequential or staged release. Herein, we demonstrate the ability to develop a self-assembled, polymer-based conformal coati...

We report a feasible approach to the preparation of monodispersed metal-shell composite microspheres based on a combination of surface reaction and surface seeding techniques. The method was implemented for coating polystyrene (PS) spheres with silver shell having a variable thickness by controlling the amount of reagents in the reaction procedure. These composite spherical particles in dimensi...

In this study, LiFePO4/C is synthesized via a novel two-step method. The first step is the synthesis of nano-sized intermediate FePO4 by a modified sol–gel method. A fast and full combustion procedure is involved to remove carbon and control the size of the intermediate particles. The second step is to prepare LiFePO4/C by combining solid-state reaction with controllable carbon coating. This tw...

We aimed to embed silica optical fibers in composites (epoxy vinyl ester matrix reinforced with E-glass unidirectional fibers in mass fraction of 60%) in order to further monitor the robustness of civil engineering structures (such as bridges). A simple system was implemented using two different silica optical fibers (F1-double coating of 172 µm diameter and F2-single coating of 101.8 µm diamet...