Search Results (2)

In this study, a glassy borosilicate compound was synthesized using recycled glass and natural clays. Even though glass recycling is the generally accepted standard practice for managing glass waste, fine fractions of container soda-lime glass or cullet of other compositions are still disposed of in landfills. Thus, advanced upcycled products that offer greater economic motivation for implementation in industry may be the key to success, but these are frequently linked to alternative methods of product synthesis. Here, a simple and facile route of borosilicate compound production has been synthesized and characterized. The physicochemical characterization of the compounds was carried out to determine their properties and the antibacterial efficacy of the synthesized compound against Escherichia coli (E. coli) was investigated. The structural and spectroscopic characteristics were identified as a compound that conformed to quartz, cristobalite, and silicon hexaboride (SiB₆). For the antibacterial activity, two test types were typically performed; in the first one, the dilutions of the grind were combined with chloramphenicol at a concentration of 20 µg/mL to perform a synergistic action against the bacteria and in the second one, only the amorphous borosilicate compound was tested against E. coli ATCC 25922 strains. The treatments applied considered the dilutions from 8 to 40 µg/mL. The minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) sensitivity tests began with incubation at 37 °C in the tubes and subsequent seeding in Petri dishes for colony-forming unit (CFU) counting. The results obtained indicated that the samples possessed a productive antibacterial effect, which support their use in various biomedical applications. Full article

Silicon borides represent very appealing industrial materials for research owing to their remarkable features, and, together with other boride and carbide-based materials, have very wide applications. Various Si–B phases have been investigated in the past, however a limited number of studies have been done on the pristine SiB₆ compound. Structure prediction using a data mining ab initio approach has been performed in pure silicon hexaboride. Several novel structures, for which there are no previous experimental or theoretical data, have been discovered. Each of the structure candidates were locally optimized on the DFT level, employing the LDA-PZ and the GGA-PBE functional. Mechanical and elastic properties for each of the predicted and experimentally observed modifications have been investigated in great detail. In particular, the ductility/brittleness relationship, the character of the bonding, Young’s modulus E, bulk modulus B, and shear modulus K, including anisotropy, have been calculated and analyzed. Full article