Photocatalytic membranes exhibit great potential for water treatment since they combine the filtration and photo degradation in a single unit. Although blending photocatalytic nanoparticles into polymeric thin film remains the simplest method to prepare the photocatalytic membrane, the entrapped photocatalyst showed less catalytic activity due to the agglomeration and shielding effects in the p...

Chitosan is a natural polymer that has been widely utilized for many purposes in the food, textile, agriculture, water treatment, cosmetic and pharmaceutical industries. Based on its characteristics, including biodegradability, non-toxicity and antimicrobial properties, it has been employed effectively in wound healing applications. Importantly, however, it is necessary to improve chitosan’s ca...

We demonstrate a novel atomic layer deposition (ALD) process to make high quality nanocrystalline titanium dioxide (TiO2) and zinc oxide (ZnO) with intermediate Al2O3 layers to limit the crystal size. The waveguide losses of TiO2/Al2O3 nanolaminates measured using the prism coupling method for both 633 nm and 1551 nm wavelengths are as low as 0.2 ± 0.1 dB/mm with the smallest crystal size. We a...

Poly(m-chloroaniline) (3clp), polydiphenylamine (dpa), copolymer of diphenylamine and mchloroaniline (3clpdpa), composite of copolymer with TiO2 (3clpdpat), and composite of copolymer with ZnO (3clpdpaz) have been chemically prepared by oxidative polymerization of polymer and copolymer with TiO2, ZnO. These were characterized by FTIR, UV–visible, Fluorescence spectra, Atomic force microscopy an...

Effect of different type of organic compounds (humic acid, oxalate, ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid, nitrilotriacetic acid, phenol) on the photocatalytic removal of cyanide with TiO2 or ZnO was studied in this work with variation of the solution pH, contact time, initial cyanide concentration and type of organic compounds. Photocatalytic oxidation efficiency of cyanide with TiO2 was greatly aff...

ZnO layers with a wide range of surface roughness and morphologies can be deposited by low pressure chemical vapor deposition (LP-CVD). In this paper, we investigate the effect of a low-resistivity TiO2-ZnO bi-layer incorporated as an anti-reflection coating between the rough ZnO front transparent conductive oxide (TCO) and the silicon layer, for thin film p-i-n microcrystalline silicon solar c...

In this work firstly ZnO nanoparticles were synthesized via a simple precipitation method. At the second step titanium dioxide and silicon dioxide shell were synthesized on the core. For preparation ZnO-TiO2-SiO2 the sol product was calcinated at 500 ºC for 2h. Properties of the product were examined by X-raydiffraction pattern (XRD), scanning electron microscope (SEM) and Fourier transform inf...

There is evidence from isolated (in vitro) cell experiments that ZnO and TiO2 may induce free radical formation in the presence of light and this free-radical generation may cause cell damage (photo-genotoxicity with ZnO). However, recent work suggests that the photogenotoxicity seen in these studies (with ZnO) may be due to an UV-induced experimental artifact in an in vitro assay, rather than ...

In this contribution we have studied the dynamics of light harvesting of ZnO nanoparticles (NPs) to a surface adsorbed sensitizing dye (SD) N719. By using the picosecond resolved Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET) technique we have explored that the excited ZnO NPs resonantly transfer visible optical radiation to the SD N719. The consequence of the energy transfer on the performance of th...