We have applied the sol-gel process to generate optical microstructures in glass using in-house developed sol-gel materials. The synthesis of our sol-gel glass materials is based on the formation of particles of controlled size from organo-metallic compounds. The overall shrinkage during annealing of the gel material is negligible and does not imply crack formation. Silica, titania and binar y ...

Efficient and robust particle separation and enrichment techniques are critical for a diverse range of lab-on-a-chip analytical devices including pathogen detection, sample preparation, high-throughput particle sorting, and biomedical diagnostics. Previously, using insulator-based dielectrophoresis (iDEP) in microfluidic glass devices, we demonstrated simultaneous particle separation and concen...

Thin polymer films have attracted attention because of both their broad range of applications and of the fundamental questions they raise regarding the dynamic response of confined polymers. These films are unstable if the temperature is above their glass transition temperature Tg. Here, we describe freestanding thin films of centimetric dimensions made of a comb copolymer melt far from its gla...

Researches on the effects produced by the sun light upon polymeric matrix composites have been increased on the last ten years. It is commonly to find literature about mechanical characteristics degradation due to different environment effects. But a few ones are related to the shear behaviour. Moreover a limited studies are related to glass fibre polyester, even that are the composites most co...

Interlaminar shear strength (ILSS) of fiber reinforced polymer composite is an important property for most of the structural applications. Matrix modification is an effective method used to improve the interlaminar shear strength of composite. In this paper, EPON 862/w epoxy system was modified using Tetraethyl orthosilicate (TEOS) electrospun nanofibers (ENFs) which were produced using electro...

Recent trends in the development of microfluidic and biodiagnostic chips favor polymer materials over glass, primarily for optical and economical reasons. Therefore, existing chemical methods to prepare biomolecule microarrays on glass slides have to be adapted or replaced in order to suit polymer substrates. Here we present a strategy to immobilize DNA and antibodies on cyclic polyolefin slide...

The reversible and dynamic nature of non-covalent interactions between the constituting building blocks renders many supramolecular polymers stimuli-responsive. This was previously exploited to create thermally and optically healable polymers, but it proved challenging to achieve high stiffness and good healability. Here we present a glass-forming supramolecular material that is based on a trif...

A challenge in regenerating large bone defects under load is to create scaffolds with large and interconnected pores while providing a compressive strength comparable to cortical bone (100-150 MPa). Here we design a novel hexagonal architecture for a glass-ceramic scaffold to fabricate an anisotropic, highly porous three dimensional scaffolds with a compressive strength of 110 MPa. Scaffolds wi...

This paper presents the growth and structure of ZnO nanorods on a sub-micrometer glass pipette and their application as an intracellular selective ion sensor. Highly oriented, vertical and aligned ZnO nanorods were grown on the tip of a borosilicate glass capillary (0.7 µm in diameter) by the low temperature aqueous chemical growth (ACG) technique. The relatively large surface-to-volume ratio o...