In this thesis multi-component mass transport in thin supported amorphous silica membranes is discussed. These membranes are micro-porous, with pore diameters smaller than 4Å and show high fluxes for small molecules (such as hydrogen) combined with high selectivities for these molecules with respect to larger ones. The chemical and thermal stability of silica membranes are favourable compared t...

The Special Issue of Nanomaterials "Ordered Mesoporous Nanomaterials" covers novel synthetic aspects of mesoporous materials and explores their use in diverse areas like drug delivery, photocatalysis, filtration or electrocatalysis. The range of materials tackled includes metals and alloys, aluminosilicates, silica, alumina and transition metal oxides. The variety of materials, synthetic approa...

Resin bonding to zirconia cannot be established from standard methods that are currently utilized in conventional silica-based dental ceramics. The solution-gelatin (sol-gel) process is a well developed silica-coating technique used to modify the surface of nonsilica-based ceramics. Here, we use this technique to improve resin bonding to zirconia, which we compared to zirconia surfaces treated ...

In this study, we investigate power generation by reverse electrodialysis in a dense silica membrane that is between two NaCl solutions with various combinations of concentrations. Each silica membrane is fabricated by depositing a silica layer on a porous alumina substrate via chemical vapor deposition. The measured potential-current (V-I) characteristics of the silica membrane are used to obt...

The investment casting of reactive Ti and TiAl alloys requires the use of selected ceramics in the face-coat layer to prevent the reaction between the cast metal and ceramic shell, avoiding the formation of a hard layer at the metallic components surface. This work aims to study the influence of ceramic shells composition in some of its characteristics such as flexural strength, friability and ...

1. Introduction A major field of ongoing study in gas mixture separation technology involves the development of novel composite ceramic membranes suitable for use across a broad range of process conditions. A common theme in these studies is the use of mesoporous/microporous support materials (e.g. α-alumina/γ-alumina, Vycor etc) with a minimum pore size of approximately 5 nm, in some cases sup...

Two Minkowski functionals were tested in the capacity of morphological descriptors to quantitatively compare the arrays of vertically-aligned graphene flakes grown on smooth and nanoporous alumina and silica surfaces. Specifically, the Euler-Poincaré characteristic and fractal dimension graphs were used to characterize the degree of connectivity and order in the systems, i.e. in the graphene fl...