Materials, Volume 8, Issue 1

Temperature and relative humidity (RH) are two major external factors, which affect equilibrium moisture content (EMC) of wood-plastic composites (WPCs). In this study, the effect of different durability treatments on sorption and desorption isothe...

The performance of advance photocatalytic degradation of 4-chlorophenoxyacetic acid (4-CPA) strongly depends on photocatalyst dosage, initial concentration and initial pH. In the present study, a simple response surface methodology (RSM) was applied...

Cadmium sulphide (CdS) quantum dot sensitized solar cells (QDSSCs) based on screen-printed TiO₂ were assembled using a screen-printing technique. The CdS quantum dots (QDs) were grown by using the Successive Ionic Layer Adsorption and Reaction (SILAR...

Evaluation of the mechanical properties of arterial wall components is necessary for establishing a precise mechanical model applicable in various physiological and pathological conditions, such as remodeling. In this contribution, a new approach fo...

In the present study polyelectrolyte complexes (PECs) based on new sulfadiazine-chitosan conjugates with sodium hyaluronate have been developed with potential use in treatment of burn wounds. The PECs were chemically characterized using Fourier Trans...

In the current work, the evolutions of grain and dislocation microstructures are investigated on the basis of plane strain tension and simple shear tests for an interstitial free steel (DC06) and a 6000 series aluminum alloy (AA6016-T4). Both materia...

Triton X-100 is one of the most widely-applied man-made non-ionic surfactants. This detergent can hardly be degraded by biological treatment. Hence, a more efficient degradation method is indispensable for the total mineralization of this pollutant....

In this study, the ability of lithium nitrite and amino alcohol inhibitors to provide corrosion protection to reinforcing steel was investigated. Two types of specimens—reinforcing steel and a reinforced concrete prism that were exposed to chloride i...

A series of esters of 2,3,6,7-tetrakis(hexyloxy)dibenzo[a,c]phenazine-11-carboxylic acid was prepared in order to probe the effects of the ester groups on the liquid crystalline behavior. These compounds exhibit columnar hexagonal phases over broad t...

Nanoscale micelles as an effective drug delivery system have attracted increasing interest in malignancy therapy. The present study reported the construction of the cholesterol-enhanced doxorubicin (DOX)-loaded poly(D-lactide)-based micelle (CDM/DOX)...

This work presents the nanoindentation and XPS results of a newly-developed biomaterial of titanium TNZ alloy after different surface treatments. The investigations were performed on the samples AR (as received), EP (after a standard electropolishing...

The editors of Materials would like to express their sincere gratitude to the following reviewers for assessing manuscripts in 2014:[...]

Scrap tires continue to be a major source of waste due to the lack of valuable and effective disposal routes. A viable solution to this problem is to recycle crumb rubber (CR)—a granulated material derived from scrap tires—and use it to develop othe...

The use of templates to assist and possess a control over the synthesis of nanomaterials has been an attractive option to achieve this goal. Here we have used sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS) to act as a template for the low temperature synthesis of coba...

In the present work, the influence of a gold nanoparticle’s shape was investigated on the commercially available Evonik Aeroxide P25. By the variation of specific synthesis parameters, three differently shaped Au nanoparticles were synthetized and de...

This paper creates a bi-directional prediction model to predict the performance of carbon fiber and the productive parameters based on a support vector machine (SVM) and improved particle swarm optimization (IPSO) algorithm (SVM-IPSO). In the SVM, it...

The use of mixtures of synthetic and natural polymers is a potential option to reduce the pollution by plastic waste. In this work, the method for the chemical modification of chitosan with poly(lactic acid) was developed; then, the preparation of fi...

Water-assisted, or more generally liquid-mediated, melt compounding of nanocomposites is basically a combination of solution-assisted and traditional melt mixing methods. It is an emerging technique to overcome several disadvantages of the above two....

C.I. Natural Red 4 dye, also known as carmine or cochineal, was adsorbed onto the surface of spongin-based fibrous skeleton of Hippospongia communis marine demosponge for the first time. The influence of the initial concentration of dye, the contact...

The electronic structure and optical absorption spectra of polymer APFO₃, [70]PCBM/APFO₃ and [60]PCBM/APFO₃, were studied with density functional theory (DFT), and the vertical excitation energies were calculated within the framework of the time-dep...

A new design and analysis of a wide-band double-negative metamaterial, considering a frequency range of 0.5 to 7 GHz, is presented in this paper. Four different unit cells with varying design parameters are analyzed to evaluate the effects of the uni...

Novel photocatalysts Gd₂FeSbO₇, Gd₂InSbO₇ and Gd₂YSbO₇ were synthesized by the solid state reaction method for the first time. A comparative study about the structural and photocatalytic properties of Gd₂MSbO₇ (M = Fe, In, Y) was reported. The resul...

N–F-co-embedded titania (N–F–TiO₂) photocatalysts with varying N:F ratios were synthesized and tested for their ability to photocatalyze the degradation of pollutants present at indoor air levels using visible light. The synthesis was achieved using...

Rammed earth (RE) is attracting renewed interest throughout the world thanks to its “green” characteristics in the context of sustainable building. In this study, the ageing effects on RE material are studied on the walls which have been constructed...