Replacing rare and expensive metal catalysts with inexpensive and earth-abundant ones is currently among the major goals of sustainable chemistry. Herein we report the synthesis of N-, O-, and S-tridoped, polypyrrole-derived nanoporous carbons (NOSCs) that can serve as metal-free, selective electrocatalysts and catalysts for oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) and alcohol oxidation reaction (AOR), ...

Organic–inorganic interfaces exist in many natural or synthetic materials, such as mineral–protein interfaces found in bone and epoxy–silica interfaces found in concrete construction. Here, we report a model to predict the intrinsic strength between organic and inorganic materials, based on a molecular dynamics simulation approach combined with the metadynamics method, used to reconstruct the f...

Iron oxide nanoparticles were synthesized and coated with silica by conventional coprecipitation method. Silica coated iron oxide nanoparticles were surface functionalized with chitosan. Silica coating and chitosan functionalization were confirmed by FTIR and TG-DTA analysis. XRD pattern revealed that the pure phase of Fe3O4 was retained even after coating. Particles of average size 12 nm were ...

The spontaneous thermodynamically driven densification, the so-called physical aging, of glassy poly(mehtyl methacrylate) (PMMA) and its nanocomposites with silica has been described by means of the free volume holes diffusion model. This mechanism is able to account for the partial decoupling between physical aging and segmental dynamics of PMMA in nancomposites. The former has been found to b...

A series of aminopropyl-functionalized silica nanoparticles were prepared through a basic two step sol-gel process in water. Prior to being aminopropyl-functionalized, silica particles with an average diameter of 549 nm were prepared from tetraethyl orthosilicate (TEOS), using a Stöber method. In a second step, aminopropyl-silica particles were prepared by silanization with 3-aminopropyltrietho...

Well-defined polymer brushes grafted onto silica nanoparticles were prepared by reversible additionfragmentation chain transfer polymerization (RAFT). A versatile RAFT agent, 4-cyanopentanoic acid dithiobenzoate (CPDB), was attached to amino-functionalized colloidal silica nanoparticles by direct condensation of the mercaptothiazoline-activated CPDB with the surface amino groups. RAFT polymeriz...

Self-assembly of colloidal particles into colloidal films has many actual and potential applications. While various strategies have been developed to direct the assembly of colloidal particles, fabrication of crack-free and transferrable colloidal film with controllable crystal structures still remains a major challenge. Here we show a centrifugation-assisted assembly of colloidal silica sphere...

In this work, the spatial resolution of two quantum well intermixing processes has been obtained using spatially resolved photoluminescence. The processes investigated are impurity-free vacancy disordering using SiO2/SiO2:P caps and sputtered silica induced intermixing. These studies aimed to choose a suitable intermixing technology to realize the band gap gratings for domain disordering quasi-...