Filtering by
- All Subjects: Sustainability
- All Subjects: Nanomaterials
The environment today is facing concerns over accumulation of plastics in landfills as well as excessive CO2 emissions. Containers and packaging take up approximately 15 million tons each year, and accumulations such as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch are entering the oceans. Work has been done to alter and treat polyethylene plastic to be added to cement mixtures. This is done to increase bearing capacity and ductility of concrete in addition to decreasing carbon emissions and plastic waste.
DNA is useful for electronic applications due to its self-assembly and electronic properties. It can be improved for this purpose through the addition of metal ions. In this experiment, DNA was modified with silver ions and carbon nanotubes were attached to both ends. The DNA-CNTs were connected over a 300 nm gap between gold electrodes using cysteamine. The conductance was found to be 1.28*10-4 G0, which is similar to literature values for unmodified DNA. Therefore, modifying DNA with silver ions was not found to significantly improve the conductance. It was also found that smaller applied voltages need to be used because of electrochemistry happening above 1 V.
since the late 1990s, with the ultimate goal of improving the multi-threat capabilities of
traditional soft-body armor while significantly improving its protective efficiency - the amount
of layers of armor material required to defeat threats. To create a novel, superior materials
system to reinforce Kevlar armor for the Norica Capstone project, this thesis set out to
synthesize, recover, and characterize zinc oxide nanowire colloids.
The materials synthesized were successfully utilized in the wider Capstone effort to
dramatically enhance the protective abilities of Kevlar, while the data obtained on the 14
hydrothermal synthesis attempts and numerous challenges at recovery provided critical
information on the synthesis parameters involved in the reliable, scalable mass production of the
nanomaterial additive. Additionally, recovery was unconventionally facilitated in the absence of
a vacuum filtration apparatus with nanoscale filters by intentionally inducing electrostatic
agglomeration of the nanowires during standard gravity filtration. The subsequent application of
these nanowires constituted a pioneering use in the production of nanowire-reinforced
STF-based Kevlar coatings, and support the future development and, ultimately, the
commercialization of lighter and more-protective soft armor systems.