A study has been made of Hertzian contact damage in compressive shear stress field beneath the contact area. The observed microcrack density increases with grain size, porous and dense liquid-phase-sintered aluminas. Indentation stress–strain curves show increasing nonlinearity as the implying a threshold microstructural scale for crack initiation. In contrast, the micromechanisms controlling f...

Thin film solar cells are currently being investigated as an affordable alternative energy source because of the reduced material cost. However, these devices suffer from low efficiencies, compared to silicon wafer solar cells, due to the poor absorption of longer wavelengths of light in the very thin active layer. One method of improving the efficiency of thin film solar cells is to use light ...

The emergence of porous organic polymers (POPs) has provided great opportunities for new applications in heterogeneous catalysis owing to their unprecedented intrinsic structural features such as high surface areas, extraordinary framework stabilities and chemically adjustable compositions. In this tutorial review, representative recent developments in the POPs-based catalysts with hierarchical...

New composite membranes based on porous anodic alumina films and polymer of intrinsic microporosity (PIM-1) have been prepared using a spin-coating technique. According to scanning electron microscopy, partial penetration of polymer into the pores of alumina supports takes place giving rise to selective polymeric layers with fiber-like microstructure. Geometric confinement of rigid PIM-1 in the...

This manuscript describes the versatile fabrication and characterization of a novel composite membrane that consists of a porous alumina support, a 100 nm thick nanoporous gold coating, and a selective poly(5-(perfluorohexyl)norbornene) (pNBF6) polymer that can be grown exclusively from the nanoporous gold or throughout the membrane. Integration of the three materials is achieved by means of si...

Typically, alumina nanowires (NWs) are synthesized via physical evaporation, templated anodized aluminum oxide (AAO), or the vapor-liquid-solid (VLS) process [1,2,3]. All of these techniques have been shown to demonstrate successful growth of alumina NWs; however, in the cases where a facile method resulting in vertically aligned NWs is desired, many of these methods are difficult to integrate ...

A mussel-inspired new interfacial ionic rectification device is fabricated using porous anodic alumina nanochannels and graphene oxide via dopamine polymerization. In addition, the rectification mechanism is elucidated based on the principles of physics and thermodynamics via finite element simulation and the results show that the interface distance and surface charge play a vital role in ion t...

Nanoporous organosilica membranes are successfully coated on porous alumina tubes and tested for desalination via membrane distillation. The membranes produced pure water (up to 13 kg m(-2) h(-1)) across an extreme range of salt concentrations (10-150 g L(-1) NaCl) at moderate temperatures (≤60 °C) without exhibiting the characteristic flux decay of competing materials.

Porous alumina templates (AAO) has attracted significant interest due to the fact that they are readily fabricated through a simple procedure and are extremely popular templates in nanoscience studies. In this paper, the effects of different pore-widening treatments on the pore quality of the AAO templates were investigated. Results show that, through a highly controllable chemical pore-widenin...

Dielectric constants of Al2O3 (alumina) ceramic samples have been measured with non-destructive terahertz time-domain spectroscopy. Using an effective medium approximation, we demonstrated that the relative permittivity can be used to evaluate porous alumina samples, porosity fractions ranging from 0% 20% per volume. This result makes it possible control sample porosity, a key material paramete...