The research field of man-made nano/micromotors is growing significantly at the level of new materials and fabrication, as well as numerous exciting demonstrations, ranging from Visible light-driven nano/micromotors are promising candidates for biomedical and environmental applications. This study demonstrates blue light-driven Ag/AgCl-based spherical Janus micromotors, which couple plasmonic light absorption with the photochemical decomposition of AgCl. These micromotors reveal high motility in pure water, i.e., mean squared displacements (MSD) reaching 800 µm 2 within 8 s, which is 100× higher compared to previous visible light-driven Janus micromotors and 7× higher than reported ultraviolet (UV) light-driven AgCl micromotors. In addition to providing design rules to realize efficient Janus micromotors, the complex dynamics revealed by individual and assemblies of Janus motors is investigated experimentally and in simulations. The effect of suppressed rotational diffusion is focused on, compared to UV light-driven AgCl micromotors, as a reason for this remarkable increase of the MSD. Moreover, this study demonstrates the potential of using visible light-driven plasmonic Ag/AgCl-based Janus micromotors in human saliva, phosphate-buffered saline solution, the most common isotonic buffer that mimics the environment of human body fluids, and Rhodamine B solution, which is a typical polluted dye for demonstrations of photocatalytic environmental remediation. This new knowledge is useful for designing visible light driven nano/micromotors based on the surface plasmon resonance effect and their applications in assays relevant for biomedical and ecological sciences. Janus Micromotors

Simultaneous decoration of Co3O4 nanoparticles and heteroatom doping on laser-induced graphene based on a duplicate pyrolysis method for supercapacitor applications.

The reduction of graphene oxide (GO) generally involves the use of chemical agents or high-temperature processes, raising concerns about safety, environment, and energy consumption issues. While self-propagating reduction of GO films was observed to produce functional rGO, potentially mitigating these issues, its process control has not yet been extensively explored. This study proposes a controllable self-propagating reduction of GO films by adjusting the base temperature of the films within low values (50 C-90 C). For understanding the reduction mechanism, the speed and peak temperature of the moving reduction front were measured in real-time, and a heat transfer model was proposed to explain the self-propagating reduction based on the observed reduction kinetics. When used for binder-free supercapacitor electrodes, the rGO films exhibited competitive specific capacitance (112 F/g) and excellent capacitance retention (94%) after 10 000 cycles. This study opens a new avenue for efficiently exploiting the self-propagating reduction of GO films to produce high-quality rGO at a minimal energy cost.

The use of copper nanoparticles (CuNPs) in conductive inks has attracted much attention to printed circuit board manufacturers due to its high electrical conductivity and low cost. The synthesis of CuNPs by surfactant-assisted chemical reduction method was studied aiming to identify the content of PVP-surfactant corresponding to the size of copper particles. The crystallite size and phase of CuNPs were determined by X-ray diffraction (XRD) analysis while transmission and scanning electron microscopy (TEM and SEM) were used to characterize the size of copper particles. The results showed that the crystallite and particle size of CuNPs decrease with increasing the PVP-surfactant concentration. The crystallite size values measured by TEM and XRD methods have a slight variation. The copper films were fabricated by the doctor-blade technique on PI and Al2O3 substrates. The effect of sintering temperature on conductive properties of the copper film after sintering was investigated. The copper film was sintered at low temperatures below 300oC. The electrical conductivity of copper films was measured by using the four-point probe method. The electrical resistivity of copper films archives stable at the low sintering temperature above 200°C about 0.22 mΩ.cm and 0.63 mΩ.cm for that of Al2O3 and PI substrates respectively.