High performance functional coatings, based on hybrid organic/inorganic materials, are being developed to combine the polymer flexibility and ease of processing with the mechanical properties and versatility of inorganic materials. By incorporating silica nanoparticles (SiNPs) in the polymeric matrices, it is possible to obtain hybrid polymer films with increased tensile strength and impact res...

The sensitivity of graphite furnace atomic absorption spectrometry (GFAAS) to arsenobetaine (AB) was 1.3-times higher than to inorganic As. In order to understand the mechanism underlying this observation, the atomization processes for both chemical species were investigated in terms of the enthalpy change (DeltaH) during the atomization process in GFAAS. The enthalpy change of AB was slightly ...

Composite materials with unique architectures are ubiquitous in nature, e.g., marine shells, sponge spicules, bones, and dentine. These structured organic-inorganic systems are generated through self-assembly of organic matter (usually proteins or lipids) into scaffolds, onto which the inorganic component is deposited in organized hierarchical structures of sizes spanning several orders of magn...

The term bionanocomposites was introduced several years ago, to define an emerging class of biohybrid materials, resulting from the combination of biopolymers such as polysaccharides, proteins, nucleic acids, etc. with inorganic solids at the nanometric scale [1] and [2]. Such inorganic fraction consists of finely divided solids, spanning from clays to phosphates or carbonates, whose origin can...

Materials synthesis in the liquid phase, or wet-chemical synthesis, utilizes a solution medium in which the target materials are generated from a series of chemical and physical transformations. Although this route is central in organic chemistry, for materials synthesis the low operational temperature range of the solvent (usually below 200 °C, in extreme 350 °C) is a serious restriction. Here...

Among the conducting polymers, polyaniline (PANI) and polypyrrole (PPy) are the most popular. According to the Web of Science, more than 10,000 papers appeared in the past 30 years on various aspects of chemistry, physics, and engineering of PANI. This is due to the cheapness and easy availability of raw materials, ease of synthesis, good environmental stability, high electrical conductivity an...

The idea of fi rst-principles methods is to determine the properties of materials by solving the basic equations of quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics. With such an approach, one can, in principle, predict the behavior of novel materials without the need to synthesize them and create a virtual design laboratory. By showing several examples of new electrode materials that have been comp...

We fabricated sub-wavelength periodic structures by thermal nano-imprinting using our original functionally modified inorganic–organic hybrid materials. The fabricated structures exhibited excellent uniformity and surface smoothness over a large imprinted area. In addition, optical transmittance is more than 90% within visible wavelength regions after heat treatment for 2 h at 300 C. These nano...