Hydrogen production from water splitting of real-time industry effluent using novel photocatalyst

Harvesting Vibration Energy for Efficient Cocatalyst-Free Sonocatalytic H2 Production over Magnetically Separable Ultra-Low-Cost Fe3O4

The cavitation effect is an important geochemical phenomenon, which generally exists under strong hydrodynamic conditions. Therefore, developing an economical and effective sonocatalyst becomes a vital method in capitalizing on the cavitation effect for energy generation. In this study, we first report a novel Fe3O4 sonocatalyst that can be easily separated using a magnetic field and does not require any additional cocatalysts for H2 production from H2O. When subjected to ultrasonic vibration, this catalyst achieves an impressive H2 production rate of up to 175 μmol/h/USD (where USD stands for dollars), surpassing most previously reported mechanical catalytic materials. Furthermore, the ease and efficiency of separating this catalyst using an external magnetic field, coupled with its effortless recovery, highlight its significant potential for practical applications. By addressing the key limitations of conventional sonocatalysts, our study not only demonstrates the feasibility of using Fe3O4 as a highly efficient sonocatalyst but also showcases the exciting possibility of using a new class of magnetically separable sonocatalysts to productively transform mechanical energy into chemical energy.

Room Temperature Synthesized TiO2 Nanoparticles for Two-Folds Enhanced Mechanical Properties of Unsaturated Polyester

Using of nano-inclusion to reinforce polymeric materials has emerged as a potential technique to achieve an upper extreme of specific strength. Despite the significant improvement of mechanical properties via nano-reinforcements, the commercial application of such nano-composites is still restricted, due to high cost and unwanted aggregation of nanoparticles in the polymer matrix. To address these issues, here we proposed a scalable and economical synthesis of TiO₂ at low temperatures, resulting in self-dispersed nanoparticles, without any surfactant. As lower energy is consumed in the synthesis and processing of such nanoparticles, so their facile gram-scale synthesis is possible. The defect-rich surface of such nanoparticles accommodates excessive dangling bonds, serving as a center for the functional groups on the surface. Functional surface enables high dispersion stability of room temperature synthesized TiO₂ particles. With this motivation, we optimized the processing conditions and concentration of as-synthesized nano-particles for better mechanical properties of unsaturated polyester (UP) resin. The composite structure (UP-TiO₂) showed nearly two folds higher tensile, flexural, and impact strength, with 4% content of nanoparticles. Characterization tools show that these better mechanical properties are attributed to a strong interface and superior dispersion of nanoparticles, which facilitate better stress distribution in the composite structure. In addition, the crack generation and propagation are restricted at a much smaller scale in nanocomposites, therefore significant improvement in mechanical properties was observed.