We have for the first time found that completely insulating Halloysite nanotubes (HNTs) significantly enhance electrical conductivity of PEDOT/PSS films by simply mixing. Based on this accident finding we have created highly porous and conductive PEDOT/PSS films hybridized with the HNTs. Through further optimization of the mixing condition we have obtained flexible and conductive hybrid films w...

The extraction of renewable energy resources particularly from earth abundant materials has always been a matter of significance in industrial products. Herein, we report a novel simultaneous extraction of nano-silicon with activated carbons (nano-Si@ACs) from rice husk (RH) by chemical activation method. As-extracted nano-Si@ACs is then used as an energy harvesting materials in counter electro...

We present the first use of digital microfluidic techniques to perform on-chip solid phase extraction (SPE). The material used for SPE was a porous polymer monolith with 12-carbon functionality (C12 PPM) which was photopolymerized on-chip and used to desalt a peptide sample prior to nano-electrospray ionization mass spectrometric analysis (nano-ESI-MS). We anticipate this technique may be usefu...

Recently we proposed a periodic surface model to assist geometric construction in computer-aided nano-design. This implicit surface model helps create super-porous nano structures parametrically and support crystal packing. In this paper, we study construction methods of Minkowski sums for periodic surfaces. A numerical approximation approach based on the Chebyshev polynomials is developed and ...

This study investigated ink penetration through imaging technology, first by gray and contour mapping and then calculating the ink penetration depth by programing. Next, a series of further analyses were carried out, including average ink permeability, ink distributions, and printability of different uncoated inkjet paper with different parameters. The impact on ink penetration of the microstru...

Titanium dioxide nano-particles were synthesized via the sol-gel method using titanium butoxide as the precursor. Acid catalyzed and aged gels were dried under air to produce xerogels and under supercritical conditions to produce aerogels. Porous particles obtained were characterized using X-ray diffraction, SEM and BET analysis. Aerogel powder was found to have more favorable properties compar...

In this paper, a porous polymer nanostructure has been integrated with droplet-based microfluidics in a single planar format. Monolithic porous polymer (MPP) was formed selectively within a microfluidic channel. The resulting analyte bands were sequentially comartmentalised into droplets. This device reduces band broadening and the effects of post-column dead volume by the combination of the tw...

In this work, we measure the thermal and thermoelectric properties of large-area Si0.8Ge0.2 nano-meshed films fabricated by DC sputtering of Si0.8Ge0.2 on highly ordered porous alumina matrices. The Si0.8Ge0.2 film replicated the porous alumina structure resulting in nano-meshed films. Very good control of the nanomesh geometrical features (pore diameter, pitch, neck) was achieved through the a...

In this work, we investigate the effect of broadband antireflection of a medium by a layer of embedded nano-cavities arranged near the surface. It is shown that this structure is versatile and allows near 100% transmittance in a wide spectral range practically for any dielectric material. The approximate model of nano-structured layer is suggested that allows to determine the parameters of the ...