Topic Review
Acoustic Metamaterials
Acoustic metamaterials are large-scale materials with small-scale structures. These structures allow for unusual interaction with propagating sound and endow the large-scale material with exceptional acoustic properties not found in normal materials. However, their multi-scale nature means that the manufacture of these materials is not trivial, often requiring micron-scale resolution over centimetre length scales.
  • 574
  • 03 Jun 2021
Topic Review
Nanostructured Mg-Based Hydrogen Storage Systems
As the most abundant element in the world, hydrogen is a promising energy carrier and has received continuously growing attention in the last couple of decades. At the very moment, hydrogen fuel is imagined as the part of a sustainable and eco-friendly energy system, the “hydrogen grand challenge”. Among the large number of storage solutions, solid-state hydrogen storage is considered to be the safest and most efficient route for on-board applications via fuel cell devices. Notwithstanding the various advantages, storing hydrogen in a lightweight and compact form still presents a barrier towards the wide-spread commercialization of hydrogen technology. In this review paper we summarize the latest findings on solid-state storage solutions of different non-equilibrium systems which have been synthesized by mechanical routes based on severe plastic deformation. Among these deformation techniques, high-pressure torsion is proved to be a proficient method due to the extremely high applied shear strain that develops in bulk nanocrystalline and amorphous materials.
  • 569
  • 17 Jun 2021
Topic Review
Wearable Functional Textiles
Wearable E-textile systems should be comfortable so that highest efficiency of their functionality can be achieved. The development of electronic textiles (functional textiles) as a wearable technology for various applications has intensified the use of flexible wearable functional textiles instead of wearable electronics. However, the wearable functional textiles still bring comfort complications during wear. The purpose of this review paper is to sightsee and recap recent developments in the field of functional textile comfort evaluation systems. For textile-based materials which have close contact to the skin, clothing comfort is a fundamental necessity.
  • 567
  • 03 Nov 2021
Topic Review
Nanoarchitectonics for Hierarchical Fullerene Nanomaterials
Fullerenes can be regarded as simple and fundamental building blocks with mono-elemental and zero-dimensional natures, these demonstrations for hierarchical functional structures impress the high capability of the nanoarchitectonics approaches. In fact, various hierarchical structures such as cubes with nanorods, hole-in-cube assemblies, face-selectively etched assemblies, and microstructures with mesoporous frameworks are fabricated by easy fabrication protocols. The fabricated fullerene assemblies have been used for various applications including volatile organic compound sensing, microparticle catching, supercapacitors, and photoluminescence systems.
  • 564
  • 10 Sep 2021
Topic Review
The Rheological Phase Reaction Method
The term “rheology” stands for the study of a material’s flow behavior under applied deformation forces or stress. The Rheological Phase Reaction (RPR) method is considered a “pollution-less method” to prepare any metal oxides with high crystallinity, phase purity, and fewer agglomerations depending on the proper raw materials and the right temperature conditions are being chosen. 
  • 553
  • 03 Feb 2023
Topic Review
Effect of Phosphate on Steel Reinforcements in Mortar
Sodium nitrite (NaNO2), disodium stannate (Na2SnO3), disodium molybdate (Na2MoO4), sodium borates (NaBO2), trisodium borate (Na3BO3), cerium nitrate (Ce(NO3)2) and trisodium phosphate (Na3PO4) (TSP) have been used as corrosion inhibitors for steel. The use of phosphate chemical conversion (PCC) coatings causes the phosphates to react with Fe ions, forming insoluble compounds, thus impeding the corrosion process. Soluble phosphates react with portlandite to trigger the precipitation of an insoluble phosphate, thus reducing the phosphate content in the pore solution and, consequently, acting as a corrosion prevention method. 
  • 544
  • 28 Mar 2022
Topic Review
Effect of Grain Size on B4C and β-SiC
Nanocrystalline materials are categorized as having average grain sizes below 100 nm with a larger volume fraction of grain boundaries (GBs), leading to significant changes in their mechanical, physical, and chemical properties. Lightweight polycrystalline ceramics possess promising physical, chemical, and mechanical properties, which can be used in a variety of important structural applications. However, these ceramics with coarse-grained structures are brittle and have low fracture toughness due to their rigid covalent bonding (more often consisting of high-angle grain boundaries) that can cause catastrophic failures. Owing to these failure mechanisms in polycrystalline ceramics, a reduction in grain size to a nano-regime, which is expected to enhance the combination of hardness (or strength), toughness, and ductility, provides a promising nanomechanical research direction compared to counterpart micro-sized polycrystalline ceramics. Apart from the effects of grain size itself, the mechanical properties of B4C and SiC also show high dependency on their properties such as composition variation, anisotropy, density, etc.
  • 539
  • 28 Sep 2022
Topic Review
Anti-Graffiti Treatments on Natural Stone Materials
Graffiti vandalism represents an aesthetic and structural phenomenon of degradation both for buildings and cultural heritage: the most used sprays and markers can permeate the stone materials exposing them to degradation. Hence, great attention is being currently devoted to new non-invasive chemical approaches to face this urgent problem. This work is aimed at deeply examining the effects of some of the most sustainable chemical protective methods on the physical properties of natural building materials (e.g., tuff and limestone) by testing two commercial antigraffiti products.
  • 537
  • 21 Jan 2022
Topic Review
Low-Dimensional Photocatalysts for CO2 Conversion
The ongoing energy crisis and global warming caused by the massive usage of fossil fuels and emission of CO2 into atmosphere continue to motivate researchers to investigate possible solutions. The conversion of CO2 into value-added solar fuels by photocatalysts has been suggested as an intriguing solution to simultaneously mitigate global warming and provide a source of energy in an environmentally friendly manner. There has been considerable effort for nearly four decades investigating the performance of CO2 conversion by photocatalysts, much of which has focused on structure or materials modification. In particular, the application of low-dimensional structures for photocatalysts is a promising pathway. Depending on the materials and fabrication methods, low-dimensional nanomaterials can be formed in zero dimensional structures such as quantum dots, one-dimensional structures such as nanowires, nanotubes, nanobelts, and nanorods, and two-dimensional structures such as nanosheets and thin films. These nanostructures increase the effective surface area and possess unique electrical and optical properties, including the quantum confinement effect in semiconductors or the localized surface plasmon resonance effect in noble metals at the nanoscale. 
  • 533
  • 29 Apr 2021
Topic Review
Corrosion Monitoring in Atmospheric Conditions
A variety of techniques are available for monitoring metal corrosion in electrolytes. However, only some of them can be applied in the atmosphere, in which case a thin discontinuous electrolyte film forms on a surface. Traditional and state-of-the-art real-time corrosion monitoring techniques include atmospheric corrosion monitor (ACM), electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS), electrochemical noise (EN), electrical resistance (ER) probes, quartz crystal microbalance (QCM), radio-frequency identification sensors (RFID), fibre optic corrosion sensors (FOCS) and respirometry.
  • 530
  • 27 Jan 2022
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