Nickel oxide thin films have been widely studied as an optical active layer in electrochromic devices. It is well known for these films that thermal treatment is the key factor which determines the electrochromic effect during potential cycling. Therefore, it is extremely important to perform thermal analysis on the thin films rather than on the corresponding xerogels. In this article, the ther...

Platinum catalysts supported on carbon xerogel and carbon black (Vulcan) were synthesized with the aim of investigating the influence of the characteristics of the support on the electrochemical performance of the catalysts. Three synthesis methods were compared: an impregnation method with two different reducing agents, sodium borohydride and formic acid, and a microemulsion method, in order t...

A long-standing issue regarding the local and long-range structure of V(2)O(5)*nH(2)O xerogel has been successfully addressed. The full three-dimensional structure of the lamellar turbostratic V(2)O(5)*nH(2)O xerogel was determined by the atomic pair distribution function technique. We show that on the atomic scale the slabs of the xerogel can be described well as almost perfect pairs (i.e., bi...

classical xerogels are robust, inexpensive and nontoxic materials with low-ordered nanoporous structures. in water streams where the ph is higher than the point of zero charge, the surface of classical xerogels such as tetraethoxy orthosilan (teos) xerogel is negatively charged. it was assumed that a xerogel can work as a strong adsorbent for metal ions without further modification. therefore, ...

Halide-permeable xerogel films prepared from sols containing 50 mol% aminopropyltriethoxysilane (APTES)/50 mol% tetraethoxysilane (TEOS) or 10 mol% APTES/90 mol% TEOS and 0.015 M selenoxide or telluride catalyst in the sol gave reduced settlement of cypris larvae of the barnacle Balanus amphitrite and larvae of the tubeworm Hydroides elegans in the presence of artificial seawater (ASW) and hydr...

Nanofibrous membranes, consisting of a poly(L-lactic acid) (PLLA)-silica xerogel hybrid material, were successfully fabricated from a hybrid sol using the electrospinning technique for guided bone regeneration (GBR) application. These hybrid nanofibers exhibited a homogeneous and continuous morphology, with a nano-sized dispersed silica xerogel phase in the PLLA fiber matrix. The mechanical pro...

In the past few years, the sol-gel polycondensation technique has been increasingly employed with great success as an alternative approach to the preparation of molecularly imprinted materials (MIMs). The main aim of this study was to study, through a series of molecular dynamics (MD) simulations, the selectivity of an imprinted silica xerogel towards a new template-the (±)-2-(P-Isobutylphenyl)...

Porous materials in general have received great attention from the last century. The development of new porous materials and the preparation of new composites based on porous materials is a subject of interest. The development of porous silicon based optical composite materials opened up new ways of incorporating optically active sol-gel materials into porous silicon. High purity silica optical...

Classical xerogels are robust, inexpensive and nontoxic materials with low-ordered nanoporous structures. In water streams where the pH is higher than the Point of Zero Charge, the surface of classical xerogels such as tetraethoxy orthosilan (TEOS) xerogel is negatively charged. It was assumed that a xerogel can work as a strong adsorbent for metal ions without further modification. Therefore, ...

The photoluminescence features of Eu(3+)-, Tb(3+)-, Tb(3+)/Eu(3+)-alginate aerogel (hydrogel and alcogel) and Eu(3+)-alginate xerogel hybrids were investigated. The Eu(3+)-alginate aerogel and alcogel exhibit the highest (5)D0 quantum efficiencies (9.9 and 8.2%, respectively), while the hydrogel and xerogel have lower values (5.2 and 5.6%, respectively). The Tb(3+)/Eu(3+) hybrids are multiwavel...