A summary of the most important technological applications employing reduced graphene oxide.

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We show that by modifying the chemical interface of silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) with halide ions, it is possible to tune the total decay rate of adsorbed excited molecules and the plasmon damping rate. Through single-molecule surface-enhanced Raman scattering and surface-enhanced fluorescence enhancement factors of crystal violet (CV) and rhodamine 6G (R6G), we show that I–-modified AgNPs (AgNPs@I) and Br–-modified AgNPs (AgNPs@Br) lead to an increase in the total decay rate of excited CV and R6G by a factor between ∼1.6–2.6, compared to Cl–-modified AgNPs (AgNPs@Cl). In addition, we found that the chemical interface damping, which characterizes the plasmon resonance decay into surface states, is stronger on AgNPs@I and AgNPs@Br when compared to AgNPs@Cl. These results point toward the formation of metal–halide surface complexes. These new interfacial states can accept electrons from both excited molecular orbitals and surface plasmon excitations, completely altering the electronic dynamics and reactivity of plasmonic interfaces.

We show that a precise control of deposition speed during the fabrication of polyfullerenes and donor polymer films by convective self-assembly leads to an optimized film microstructure comprised of interconnected crystalline polymer domains comparable to molecular dimensions intercalated with similar polyfullerene domains. Moreover, in blended films, we have found a correlation between deposition speed, the resulting microstructure, and photoluminescence quenching. The latter appeared more intense for lower deposition speeds due to a more favorable structuring at the nanoscale of the two donor and acceptor systems in the resulting blend films.

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This study investigates bioethanol production from Abies alba wood. The wood was first autohydrolysed, then delignified and the remaining cellulose was used as substrate for simultaneous saccharification and fermentation processes. The influence of temperature (180, 190 and 200 °C) and pretreatment time (5, 10 and 15 min) on the fermentation medium products was studied. The maximal bioethanol content (52.0 g L -1 ) was obtained at a pretreatment temperature of 190 °C and pretreatment time of 10 min. The enzymatic hydrolysis and fermentation temperature was 38 °C for 72 h. The untreated, autohydrolysed and delignified wood was characterized by reflected light microscopy for morphological structure identification. The adaptive network-based fuzzy interference model (ANFIS) and the Gaussian membership function were used to reproduce the experimental results obtained for complete characterization of the wood fermentation broth. The proposed model uses two input variables (temperature and reaction time) and one output parameter based on two intelligent methods: back-propagation and a hybrid method. The hybrid intelligent method has good accuracy (99.2-100.0%) and correlation coefficient (0.998-1). The fermentation broth contains a mixture of bioethanol and secondary by-products, including acids, alcohols, aldehydes, ketones and esters. A maximum of 5.2 g bioethanol can be obtained from 100 g of woody biomass after autohydrolysisdelignification-SSF process.

In this study we have employed a polymer processing method based on solvent vapor annealing in order to condense relatively large amounts of solvent vapors onto thin films of block copolymers and thus to promote their self-assembly into ordered nanostructures. As revealed by the atomic force microscopy, a periodic lamellar morphology of poly(2-vinylpyridine)-b-polybutadiene and an ordered morphology comprised of hexagonally-packed structures made of poly(2-vinylpyridine)-b-poly(cyclohexyl methacrylate) were both successfully generated on solid substrates for the first time.