The present investigation depicts the development of a simple and low cost method for the removal of color from textile dyeing and printing wastewater using ZnO as photocatalyst supported with porous activated carbon (AC). Photocatalytic degradation studies were carried out for water soluble toxic alizarin cyanin green (ACG) dye in aqueous suspension along with activated carbon (AC) as co-adsor...

Hierarchical cellular structures are ubiquitous in nature because of their low-density, high-specific properties, and multifunctionality. Inspired by these systems, we created lightweight ceramic architectures composed of closed-cell porous struts patterned in the form of hexagonal and triangular honeycombs by direct foam writing. The foam ink contains bubbles stabilized by attractive colloidal...

Carbon-supported Pt catalysts have been widely employed as electrocatalysts for energy storage/conversion applications, but have encountered challenging instability issues. In this work, we investigated the degradation behaviors of pore-confined and surface-located Pt nanocatalysts, employing hollow porous carbon spheres with precisely controlled structure as catalyst supports. It is found that...

Porous ceramic materials have found widespread technological and industrial applications from filtration, absorption, catalysts and catalyst supports to lightweight structural components. In the present work, processing is based on the generation of foam from an aqueous suspension of ceramic powder and the subsequent stabilization of the structure by in-situ polymerization of organic monomers. ...

Polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells (PEMFC) efficiently convert the reaction energy of hydrogen and oxygen to electricity, water and heat. The oxygen reduction reaction occurs in composite nanostructured catalyst layers (CL) formed from Pt nanoparticles supported on a network of carbon particle agglomerates. Oxygen reaches the reaction site through diffusion. Understanding the diffusion pro...

Porous electrodes provide high-surface-area supports for the catalysts of many reactions, but the influences of electrode preparation conditions on electrocatalysts are not always well understood. Electrochemical impedance spectroscopy ~EIS! can provide extensive information about an electrode, but the models describing the spectra are often too idealized to draw useful conclusions. We describe...

Merging nanoparticles with different functions into a single microsphere can exhibit profound impact on various applications. However, retaining the unique properties of each component after integration has proven to be a significant challenge. Our previous research demonstrated a facile method to incorporate magnetic nanoparticles into porous silica microspheres. Here, we report the fabricatio...

Practical application of hydrogen production from water splitting relies strongly on the development of low-cost and high-performance electrocatalysts for hydrogen evolution reaction (HER). The previous researches mainly focused on transition metal nitrides as HER catalysts due to their electrical conductivity and corrosion stability under acidic electrolyte, while tungsten nitrides have report...

Introduction Amorphous materials have no long-range order at the atomic length scale and show different properties as compared to typical crystalline materials. Among of them, amorphous alloys are in thermodynamically nonequilibrium, crystallized by heating and used as catalysts and catalyst precursors. Investigations on the relationships between their catalytic performances and structural chan...

The lithium-air battery is one of the most promising technologies among various electrochemical energy storage systems. We demonstrate that a novel air electrode consisting of an unusual hierarchical arrangement of functionalized graphene sheets (with no catalyst) delivers an exceptionally high capacity of 15000 mAh/g in lithium-O(2) batteries which is the highest value ever reported in this fi...