A bulk heterojunction of porous silicon and eumelanin, where the columnar pores of porous silicon are filled with eumelanin, is proposed as a new organic-inorganic hybrid material for photovoltaic applications. The addition of eumelanin, whose absorption in the near infrared region is significantly higher than porous silicon, should greatly enhance the light absorption capabilities of the empty...

porous silicon samples were prepared by electrochemical etching method for different etching times. the structural properties of porous silicon (ps) samples were determined from the atomic force microscopy (afm) measurements. the surface mean root square roughness (σ rms) changes as function of porosity were studied, and the influence of etching time on porosity and roughness was studied too. u...

Porous silicon nanowires are synthesized through metal assisted wet-chemical etch of highly-doped silicon wafer. The resulted porous silicon nanowires exhibit a large surface area of 337 m(2)·g(-1) and a wide spectrum absorption across the entire ultraviolet, visible and near infrared regime. We further demonstrate that platinum nanoparticles can be loaded onto the surface of the porous silicon...

This paper presents our research on silicon-based proton exchange membranes for siliconbased micro fuel cell applications. The porous silicon membranes with a thickness of 20-40 m were fabricated. And the porous silicon-based proton exchange membranes were formed by using the combination of the porous silicon membranes and Nafion solution. The proton conductivities of the porous silicon-based P...

Silicon nanoparticles are the focus of attention thanks to their potentialities in advanced applications such as new batteries, photovoltaic cells and so on. The need to porous silicon is thus rising and will follow the same trend. In this work, highly porous nanostructured silicon is synthesized via Self-propagating high-temperature synthesis (SHS) route. Microstructural and phase analyses sho...

Porous materials in general have received great attention from the last century. The development of new porous materials and the preparation of new composites based on porous materials is a subject of interest. The development of porous silicon based optical composite materials opened up new ways of incorporating optically active sol-gel materials into porous silicon. High purity silica optical...

We present graphene synthesized by chemical vapour deposition under atmospheric pressure on both porous nanostructures and flat wafers as electrode scaffolds for supercapacitors. A 3nm thin gold layer was deposited on samples of both porous and flat silicon for exploring the catalytic influence during graphene synthesis. Micro-four-point probe resistivity measurements revealed that the resistiv...

Porous silicon layers were elaborated by electrochemical etching of heavily doped p-type silicon substrates. Metallization of porous silicon was carried out by immersion of substrates in diluted aqueous solution of nickel. Amorphous silicon thin films were deposited by plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition on metalized porous layers. Deposited amorphous thin films were crystallized under va...

We have recently developed a new type of porous silicon we name as porous silicon colloids. They consist of almost perfect spherical silicon nanoparticles with a very smooth surface, able to scatter (and also trap) light very efficiently in a large-span frequency range. Porous silicon colloids have unique properties because of the following: (a) they behave as optical microcavities with a high ...