Tungsten carbide cobalt (WC-Co) has been recognized as a workplace inhalation hazard in the manufacturing, mining and drilling industries by the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health. Exposure to WC-Co is known to cause "hard metal lung disease" but the relationship between exposure, toxicity and development of disease remain poorly understood. To better understand this relations...

This paper provides an overview on our recent investigations on the consolidation of hierarchy-structured nanopowder agglomerates and related applications to net-shaping nanopowder materials. Understanding the nanopowder agglomerate sintering (NAS) process is essential to processing of net-shaped nanopowder materials and components with small and complex shape. The key concept of the NAS proces...

Mastery over the structure of nanoparticles might be an effective way to enhance their performance for a given application. Herein we demonstrate the design of cage-bell nanostructures to enhance the methanol tolerance of platinum (Pt) nanoparticles while remaining their catalytic activity for oxygen reduction reaction. This strategy starts with the synthesis of core-shell-shell nanoparticles w...

Smart hydrogels, or stimuli-responsive hydrogels, are three-dimensional networks composed of crosslinked hydrophilic polymer chains that are able to dramatically change their volume and other properties in response to environmental stimuli such as temperature, pH and certain chemicals. Rapid and significant response to environmental stimuli and high elasticity are critical for the versatility o...

Bio-nano-process (BNP) has been proposed as promising bottom-up process to fabricate nanostructure. The application of BNP to memory devices such as resistive random access memory (ReRAM) is large interested because BNP could offer attractive solution to reduce the memory size and improve the device performance. We investigate the application of metal nano dot to ReRAM for control the filament ...

Hard, biological materials are generally hierarchically structured from the nano- to the macro-scale in a somewhat self-similar manner consisting of mineral units surrounded by a soft protein shell. Considerable efforts are underway to mimic such materials because of their structurally optimized mechanical functionality of being hard and stiff as well as damage-tolerant. However, it is unclear ...

BACKGROUND Polymers are attractive materials for both biomedical engineering and cardiovascular applications. Although nano-topography has been found to influence cell behaviour, no established method exists to understand and evaluate the effects of nano-topography on polymer-blood interaction. RESULTS We optimized a micro-fluidic set-up to study the interaction of whole blood with nano-struc...

To manipulate the size of noble metal particles on a nanometer scale are priority subjects in the field of nanotechnology. So far various approaches have been developed to synthesize noble metal nanoparticles in controlled sizes and dimensions. Among them the colloidal systems become broadly used. These systems can be made up of several very different reactants and solvents: a continuous medium...

Production of nanostructured aluminum matrix composite powder by high energy ball milling is investigated. Scanning electron microscopy analysis as well as the tap and green density measurements were used to optimize the milling time needed for the completion of the mechanical milling process. Also, we studied the particles morphology and size distribution change with milling time and its corre...