Silica nanotubes have been extensively applied in the biomedical field. However, very little attention has been paid to the fabrication and application of micropatterned silica nanotubes. In the present study, microgrooved silica nanotube membranes were fabricated in situ by microgrooving silica-coated collagen hybrid fibril hydrogels in a Teflon microfluidic chip followed by calcination for re...

Highly ordered, and conductive inverse opal arrays were made with silica and subsequently coated with tin-doped indium oxide (ITO) via atomic layer deposition (ALD). We demonstrate the utility of the resulting mesostructured electrodes by further coating them with nickel oxide via ALD. The NiO-coated arrays are capable of efficiently electrochemically evolving oxygen from water. These modular, ...

The chromatographic separation of enantiomers using chiral stationary phases (CSPs) has significantly advanced. The esters and carbamates of polysaccharides coated on silica gel have been extensively studied and widely used as CSPs for high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). In order to overcome the strict solvent limitation on these coated CSPs, the preparation of a new generation of CS...

We report the synthesis of Fe3O4@mSiO2 nanostructures of different meso-silica (mSiO2) shell thickness, their biocompatibility and behaviors for loading and release of a model drug ibuprofen. The composite nanostructures have superparamagnetic magnetite cores of 208 nm average size and meso-silica shells of 15 to 40 nm thickness. A modified Stöber method was used to grow the meso-silica shells ...

Nanocomposite cation exchange membranes (CEMs) were prepared by adding various amounts of functionalized silica-coated magnetite nanoparticles to the sulfonated polyethersulfone (sPES) polymeric matrix. The particles were synthesized first by the co-precipitation method (M0). Different surface modifications were then carried out on them by grafting three functional groups of mercaptopropyl, pro...

Hollow mesoporous silica spheres have recently attracted increasing attention. However, effective synthesis of uniform hollow mesoporous spheres with controllable well-defined pore structures for fundamental research and practical applications has remained a significant challenge. In this work, a straightforward and effective "cationic surfactant assisted selective etching" synthetic strategy w...

The goal of the present study is to prepare a room temperature cured hydrophobic and self-cleaning nano-coating for power line insulators. As a result, the installed insulators operating in power lines can be coated without being removed from the circuit and without the need to cut off power. For this purpose, hydrophobic silica nanoparticles were synthesized by sol-gel method using TEOS and HM...