The world is currently facing an energy and environmental crisis for which new technologies are needed. Development of cost-competitive materials for catalysis and hydrogen storage on-board motor vehicles is crucial to lead subsequent generations into a more sustainable and energy independent future. This thesis presents work toward the scalable synthesis of bimetallic heterostructures that can...

Germanium nanocrystals ~12 nm mean diam! and amorphous thin films ~60-250 nm thick! were prepared as anodes for lithium secondary cells. Amorphous thin film electrodes prepared on planar nickel substrates showed stable capacities of 1700 mAh/g over 60 cycles. Germanium nanocrystals showed reversible gravimetric capacities of up to 1400 mAh/g with 60% capacity retention after 50 cycles. Both ele...

Here we report a magnetic composite nanocatalyst (MP@NiSiO/Pd) with a rattle type nanostructure. The nickel silicate shell encapsulated magnetic core (MP@NiSiO) rattle particles were synthesized by using a facile templating method and the Pd nanocrystals with different sizes can be directly immobilized onto the MP@NiSiO rattles without using any surfactant or capping reagents. X-Ray powder Diff...

We report a new approach to achieve growth of highly crystalline nickel nanoparticles over an extended range of sizes (up to 100 nm in diameter) and time scales (up to several hours) by diffusional transport of constituent atoms. The experimental procedure presented offers control of the morphology of the resulting particles and yields base metal nanocrystals suitable for epitaxial deposition o...

Nickel–molybdenum (Ni–Mo) materials are widely used functional oxide catalysts for the hydrogen evolution reaction. In this work, we investigate the high activity of Ni–Mo by depositing size-controlled Ni nanocrystals (NCs) onto Mo substrates. We observe a synergistic increase in catalytic activity that does not scale with the Ni–Mo interface length. This evidence points to a bulk electronic in...