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Full-Text Articles in Physics
Pressure Driven Desalination Utilizing Nanomaterials, Fangyou Xie
Pressure Driven Desalination Utilizing Nanomaterials, Fangyou Xie
Master's Theses
Nanomaterials such as graphene oxide and carbon nanotubes, have demonstrated excellent properties for membrane desalination, including decrease of maintenance, increase of flux rate, simple solution casting, and impressive chemical inertness. Here, two projects are studied to investigate nanocarbon based membrane desalination. The first project is to prepare hybrid membranes with amyloid fibrils intercalated with graphene oxide sheets. The addition of protein amyloid fibrils expands the interlayer spacing between graphene oxide nanosheets and introduces additional functional groups in the diffusion pathways, resulting in increase of flux rate and rejection rate for the organic dyes. Amyloid fibrils also provide structural assistance to …
Improving Hybrid Solar Cells: Overcoming Charge Extraction Issues In Bulk Mixtures Of Polythiophenes And Zinc Oxide Nanostructures, Grant T. Olson
Improving Hybrid Solar Cells: Overcoming Charge Extraction Issues In Bulk Mixtures Of Polythiophenes And Zinc Oxide Nanostructures, Grant T. Olson
Master's Theses
Organic photovoltaics (OPVs) have received a great deal of focus in recent years as a possible alternative to expensive silicon based solar technology. Current challenges for organic photovoltaics are centered around improving their lifetimes and increasing their power conversion efficiencies. One approach to improving the lifetime of such devices has been the inclusion of inorganic metal oxide layers, but interaction between the metal oxides and common conjugated polymers is not favorable. Here we present two methods by which the interactions between polythiophenes and nanostructured ZnO can be made to be more favorable. Using the first method, direct side on attachment …