A wide variety of nanomaterials can be found naturally occurring in the environment, although finding and characterizing these materials remains a challenge due to their size. Recent studies in the field have shown that natural nanomaterials are common in many geochemical systems. In this issue of ACS Nano, Hutchison and co-workers make us realize that manmade nanomaterials can often be practic...

Ferromagnetic two-dimensional (2D) ultrathin nanosheets hold great promise for next generation electronics. Ferromagnetic metal-free materials that usually possess only an s/p electronic configuration with weak spin-orbit coupling and a large spin relaxation time, would play an important role in constructing future spintronic devices. However, the absence of an intrinsic spin ordering structure...

The triple “generation, conversion and storage of energy” are the fundamental building blocks toward realizing the general aim of an energy supply on demand as unrestricted as possible. Meanwhile, however, it has become clear that this general aim leads to conflicting feedback loops on the ecological environment. Growing awareness of such deteriorating feedbacks has triggered worldwide activiti...

We report on a new process for producing nanostructured materials, hypersonic plasma particle deposition (ItPPD), wherein a thermal plasma seeded with vapor-phase precursors is supersonically expanded through a nozzle to nucleate ultrafine particles, which are then deposited by hypersonic impaction onto a temperature-controlled substrate. Results from preliminary experiments aimed at synthesizi...

A cost-effective and reliable Ni-Au contact on nanostructured Bi2Te3-based alloys for a solar thermoelectric generator (STEG) is reported. The use of MPS SAMs creates a strong covalent binding and more nucleation sites with even distribution for electroplating contact electrodes on nanostructured thermoelectric materials. A reliable high-performance flat-panel STEG can be obtained by using this...

oxide nanoparticles of fe-co-ni were prepared in six different compositions by co-precipitation method. the as-synthesized nanoparticles were characterized by x-ray diffraction (xrd), field emission scanning electron microscope (fesem), fourier transform infrared (ft-ir) and vibrating sample magnetometer  (vsm). it was found that the nanoparticles had mean crystalline size of 30-55 nm and spher...

Carbon nanomaterials with unique nanostructure (CMNS) are the most studied materials in nanotechnology, despite some conflicting results about their safety profiles [1, 2]. Although their structures are simple, carbon nanomaterials provide exceptional physical and chemical properties including high electrical and thermal conductivities, unique optical properties, and extreme chemical stability....

Grain shapes are acknowledged to impact nanomaterials' overall properties. Research works on this issue include grain-elongation and grain-strain measurements and their impacts on nanomaterials' mechanical properties. This paper proposes a stochastic model for grain strain undergoing severe plastic deformation. Most models deal with equivalent radii assuming that nanomaterials' grains are spher...