The 10 most-cited articles in Advanced materials research, 2021

Additive Manufacturing (AM) processes are becoming more and more important for production of parts with increasing geometrical complexity and functionality. However, to draw on the full potential of AM technologies, alloys that exploit process inherent particularities such as extremely high cooling rates (ca. 106 K/s) have to be developed. One of most important AM-processes is Laser Powder Bed Fusion (LPBF), a batch-wise process. This complicates experimental alloy development and increases the use of powder resources since only one chemical composition can be tested within one test job and the process chamber has to be cleaned carefully in between. The process Extreme High-Speed Laser Material Deposition (EHLA) has been found to have similar cooling rates as LPBF, however it uses an in situ supply of powders which allows an easy switching between materials and has potential for rapid alloy development methods. Since the mechanical properties of materials primarily depend on chemical composition and microstructure, which in turn depends heavily on the cooling rates in the production…

Most of the recent reduced graphene oxide (rGO) based sensors shows gas sensitivity above 50 o to 150°C. The present investigation deals with the gas sensing at 50°C temperature. In the present research work, thick film sensors of rGO were developed on glass substrate by using standard screen-printing technique. The silver paste of rGO was used to make electrodes for contact on thick films for the electrical and gas sensing system. The electrical properties of rGO thick films such as resistivity, activation energy and temperature coefficient were studied. The resistivity of rGO thick films was found to be 84.84 Ω/m. The morphological, elemental and structural properties of rGO thick films were analyzed by SEM, EDS and XRD techniques respectively. The crystallite size of rGO thick films was found as 28.42 nm by using Scherer’s formula. The rGO thick films were prepared and exposed to Ethanol, NH 3 , NO 2 and LPG gases to determine sensitivity and selectivity. The sensitivity of NO 2 has been found to be maximum among other exposed gases. The maximum sensitivity of NO 2 gas was 92.55…

Microchannel heat sink plays a vital role in removing a considerable amount of heat flux from a small surface area from different electronic devices. In recent times, the rapid development of electronic devices requires the improvement of these heat sinks to a greater extent. In this aspect, the selection of appropriate substrate materials of the heat sinks is of vital importance. In this paper, three boron-based ultra-high temperature ceramic materials (ZrB2, TiB2, and HfB2) are compared as a substrate material for the microchannel heat sink using a numerical approach. The fluid flow and heat transfer are analyzed using the finite volume method. The results showed that the maximum temperature of the heat source didn’t exceed 355K at 3.6MWm-2 for any material. The results also indicated HfB2 and TiB2 to be more useful as a substrate material than ZrB2. By applying 3.6 MWm-2 heat flux at the source, the maximum obtained surface heat transfer coefficient was 175.2 KWm-2K-1 in a heat sink having substrate material HfB2.

Laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) is a frequently used manufacturing process due to its advantages in lightweight construction, design possibilities and functionalization of geometry. However, the printed parts will often have to undergo time and cost expensive non-destructive testing by sophisticated methods like X-CT. Thus, there is a strong demand to identify suitable online process monitoring techniques that allow to reduce or substitute post-process NDT effort. The temperature field reacts sensitively to deviations during processing, thus online temperature monitoring is a promising approach. In the present work a spatially resolved temperature measurement, based on 2-channel-pyrometry, is used for process monitoring in LPBF. The camera system is coaxially integrated into the beam guidance of the LPBF system. The coaxial observation enables a lateral resolution better than 10 μm over the whole build-up area of 250 x 250 mm2. Single tracks were welded with different parameters and observed by the camera system to identify thermal indicators. Metallographic cross-sections of the…

The constant need for recycling, waste prevention and general environmental protection represent the new directive approaches imposed by the geo-political, industrial and environmental context, at the regional, European and global level. Ensuring the environmental protection and reducing the natural resources consumption represent general purposes of the sustainable development and also considerations to implement the Circular Economy Model [1]. The present study is developed with respect to the previously mentioned principles: the waterjet cutting operations by the use of abrasive GARNETs for quality, speed and accuracy gain, are in continuous expansion, generating proportionally increasing wastes, which could be valorized by innovatively integrating them in advanced cementitious materials for the construction industry. The international research regarding the use of abrasive waterjet Garnet wastes as raw material for construction industry are at incipient stage and quite limited, but preliminary results are promising. Further studies are presently developed, considering the…

The objectives of this study are to investigate the influence of concentration variation of potassium hydroxide (KOH) and to remove a heavy metal in liquid waste of the activated carbon. The raw material of activated carbon was obtained from pineapple crown waste. Pineapple crowns pre-carbonized at 180 oC for 1 hour. Chemical activation was carried out using KOH with concentration 2M, 3M, and 4M for 20 hours at 30 oC and temperature 60 oC for 2 hours. Microwave irradiation was conducted at 630 Watt of output power for 15 minutes. The physical properties of activated carbon were characterized using scanning electron microscopy to determine surface morphology of activated carbon, X-ray diffraction to calculated microstructure (i.e. interlayer spacing and microcrystalline dimension) using Bragg’s and Scherer’s equations, specific surface area was calculated from N2 adsorption-desorption isotherm using BET equation, Fourier-transform infrared (FTIR) identify the functional groups of activated carbon, and heavy metals absorption was tested using atomic adsorption spectrophotometric. The…

In photovoltaic system the major challenge is the cost reduction of the solar cell module to compete with those of conventional energy sources. Evolution of solar photovoltaic comprises of several generations through the last sixty years. The first generation solar cells were based on single crystal silicon and bulk polycrystalline Si wafers. The single crystal silicon solar cell has high material cost and the fabrication also requires very high energy. The second generation solar cells were based on thin film fabrication technology. Due to low temperature manufacturing process and less material requirement, remarkable cost reduction was achieved in these solar cells. Among all the thin film technologies amorphous silicon thin film solar cell is in most advanced stage of development and is commercially available. However, an inherent problem of light induced degradation in amorphous silicon hinders the higher efficiency in this kind of cell. The third generation silicon solar cells are based on nano-crystalline and nano-porous materials. Hydrogenated nanocrystalline silicon…

The validation method for determination of chemical oxygen demand (COD) with indirect UV-Vis spectrometry have been done. This method enable to easily perform highly sensitive, considerably faster and easier, and minimize the use of digestion solution. This method is the development of standard method of COD determination by closed reflux using UV-Vis spectrometry so it requires the method validation stage. The validation is used to ensure linearity, limit of detection, limit of quantification, precision, and accuracy values in accordance with quality control. This study was also carried out to formulate the uncertainty calculation modeling of COD on water analysis. The result of validation method show that the calibration curve linearity is 0.9994 with the linear regression equation Y = 0.0003X + 0.0005. The method is able to have high sensitivity in measuring COD value with low concentrations with limit of detection and limit of quantitation of 9.78 and 32.59 mg O2/L. Indirect UV-Vis spectrometry has high precision with relative standard deviation of 0.66% and high accuracy with…

Ancient archaeological sites contain numerous pottery objects that suffered from different deterioration factors. This study aims to use different analytical methods to study the chemical and mineralogical composition and identification of deterioration aspects of some ancient Egyptian pottery jars from Saqqara excavation. Thus, to explain the deterioration factors' mechanisms and apply the proper conservation methods to the deteriorated pottery jars. AutoCAD, digital microscope, scanning electron microscope (SEM-EDX), and x-ray diffraction (XRD) were used to clarify the preservation states of pottery jars. The results of the investigation revealed that the selected jars suffered from different cracks, salts crystallization, some surface black spots, separation of the slip layer, and heterogeneity in the grains size. XRD analysis revealed that quartz, diopside, illite, muscovite, orthoclase, anorthite, and hematite are the main components of the jars. SEM-EDX analysis showed high concentrations of chlorides and sulfate salts, besides the presence of manganese oxide. Different…

In this paper, the specific wear rate (SWR) and the coefficient of friction (CoF) of steel embedded glass/epoxy hybrid composites were examined and compared. Experiments were carried on the pin-on-disc machine on different types of composite materials like plain composite (steel volume 0%) and hybrid composites (steel volume 5% and 10%) pressed against a rotating steel disc (EN 31). Composites were fabricated using the hand-lay-up method. The volume percentage of steel pin/pipe varied from 0 to 10% and glass fiber from 50 to 60%, while the percentage of epoxy was kept 40% stable. The experiments were carried out on a group of samples for duration 20 minutes for different loads of 70N, 80N, 90N, 100N, and 110N with a varying sliding distance of 1000 m, 1250 m, 1500 m, 1750 m, and 2000 m. The results show that the SWR and CoF vary with different load and sliding distance. In general, CoF rises for some time of rubbing, and then it remains constant for the rest of the testing time. The results obtained show that the SWR and CoF increase with increasing sliding distance and load for all…