Energy independence requires that the nation reduce its dependence on foreign oil imports. This can be achieved through electrification of transportation vehicles if proper battery technology can be developed. In addition, the renewable energy...
No current microfabrication technique exists for producing room-temperature, high-precision, point-to-point polymer nanofibers in three dimensions. Producing rounded structures in a third dimension is particularly difficult to accomplish with...
Understanding the nucleation and early stage growth of crystals from the vapor phase is important for realizing large-area single-crystal quality films, controlled synthesis of nanocrystals, and the possible discovery of new phases of materials....
The research in this dissertation describes a simple electrochemical approach for fabricating nanoscale (metal/metal) or molecular (metal/polymer or self assembled monolayer (SAM)/metal) junctions. The fabrication involves metal deposition on one...
This dissertation describes galvanic exchange of silver (Ag) nanostructures with PdCl42- in 1) various PdCl42- concentrations, 2) the presence of 0.1 M cetyitrimethylammonium bromide (CTAB), and 3) the presence of 0.1 M potassium bromide (KBr). It...
More than 50% of the total energy produced is typically rejected in the form of waste heat from various processes. The grand challenge is that most of this waste heat is released at temperatures much lower than 1000 C, which makes it difficult to...
This dissertation demonstrates an elegant method, known as 'micro-origami' or strain architecture to design and fabricate three-dimensional MEMS structures which are assembled using actuation of a metal-oxide bilayer with conventional planar...
Nanoparticles are a class of materials that exhibit unique physical and chemical properties compared to those of the same material at the bulk scale. One method of enhancing the thermal conductivity, and hence the heat transfer coefficient, of a...
The Technical Advisory Group (TAG) of the Innovative Treatment Remediation Demonstration Program (ITRD) made technology recommendations after reviewing thirty in situ remediation technologies for implementation at the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion...
The use of monochloramines in the potable water supply industry has been selected as the disinfectant method of choice due to a longer term of effectiveness and less toxic by-products than the previous choice of chlorine. In spite of the benefits...
Respiratory syncytial virus is the leading cause of lower respiratory tract infection
in infants and currently lacks an effective vaccine or treatment beyond symptom relief.
The atomic force microscope is particularly well suited for imaging...
Nanostructured materials; Nanotubes; Nanoparticles; Drug delivery systems; Diagnostic Imaging
Nanomaterials have many intriguing applications in biology and medicine. Unique properties such as enhanced electrical properties, increased chemical reactivity and resistance to degradation, novel optical properties and comparable size to that of...
Nanoparticles; Drug delivery devices; Gene therapy
The properties and broad applications of nano-magnetic colloids have generated much interest in recent years. Specially, Fe304 nanoparticles have attracted a great deal of attention since their magnetic properties can be used for hyperthermia...
The properties of gold nanoparticles (GNP) holds promising potential for drug delivery, diagnostics, plasmonic photothermal therapy of diseases, electronics, catalysis, and photovoltaics (Liu et al., 2006; Huang et al., 2003; Thompson, 2007;...
Optical properties of carbon nanotubes have recently attracted considerable amount of attention. Due to there direct band gap material characteristic these and dimension of the order of nano meters they find potential applications in the field of...
III-nitrides (InN, GaN, AlN) are some of the most promising materials for making blue light emitting diodes (LED), blue laser diodes (LD) and high power, high temperature field effect transistors (FET). Current techniques produce GaN films with...
Liquid gallium (Ga) spontaneously alloys with thin films of metals such as Ag, Au, Pt Al, and Cu at near or even below room temperature resulting in rapid self-assembly of nanostructures. In this dissertation, studies of the formation of these...
Dielectrophoresis (DEP) is an electrokinetic force capable of attracting or repelling neutrally charged particles due to a non-uniform electric field [1, 2]. Positive dielectrophoresis attracts particles in the region of the highest electric field...
Most of the structures in submillimeter-scale engineering are created from thin films, making them essentially two-dimensional (2D). Significant work has been done to fabricate 3D structures using self-folding, a deterministic form of...
The thesis focuses on improving the flowrate of the Knudsen gas pump. The Knudsen pump uses thermal transpiration as the driving mechanism to pump gas. It is a motionless gas pump as the pump does not require any moving actuators for pumping. The...
