Hybrid Materials 2011

Introduction to Hybrid Materials

Recent technological breakthroughs and the desire for new functions generate an enormous demand for novel materials. Many of the well-established materials, such as metals, ceramics or plastics cannot fulfill all technological desires for the various new applications. Scientists and engineers realized early on that mixtures of materials can show superior properties compared with their pure coun...

Tough, bio-inspired hybrid materials.

The notion of mimicking natural structures in the synthesis of new structural materials has generated enormous interest but has yielded few practical advances. Natural composites achieve strength and toughness through complex hierarchical designs that are extremely difficult to replicate synthetically. We emulate nature's toughening mechanisms by combining two ordinary compounds, aluminum oxide...

BUCEADOR hybrid TTS for Blizzard Challenge 2011

This paper describes the Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems presented by the Buceador Consortium in the Blizzard Challenge 2011 evaluation campaign. The main system is a concatenative hybrid one that tries to combine the strong points of both statistical and unit selection synthesis (i.e. robustness and segmental naturalness respectively). The hybrid system has reached results significantly above ave...

Materials for Healthcare Applications Symposium, EUROMAT 2011 (Montpellier, France, 12-15 September 2011).

Molecular design of hybrid organic-inorganic materials

Hybrid organic-inorganic materials offer a wide range of interesting applications especially in optics. Chemistry plays a major role in the elaboration and comprehension of such materials. Sol-gel process provide a method to blend, down to the molecular scale, organic and inorganic components. Examples of hybrid organic-inorganic materials for optics and optical characterizations of hybrid mate...