Band 5, Heft 3 -

Rare earth metal oxide nanomaterials have drawn much attention in recent decades due to their unique properties and promising applications in catalysis, chemical and biological sensing, separation, and optical devices. Because of the strong structure–property correlation, controllable synthesis of nanomaterials with desired properties has long been the most important topic in nanoscience and nanotechnology and still maintains a grand challenge. A variety of methods, involving chemical, physical, and hybrid method, have been developed to precisely control nanomaterials, including size, shape, dimensionality, crystal structure, composition, and homogeneity. These nanostructural parameters play essential roles in determining the final properties of functional nanomaterials. Full understanding of nanomaterial properties through characterization is vital in elucidating the fundamental principles in synthesis and applications. It allows researchers to discover the correlations between the reaction parameters and nanomaterial properties, offers valuable insights in improving synthetic routes, and provokes new design strategies for nanostructures. In application systems, it extrapolates the structure–activity relationship and reaction mechanism and helps to establish quality model for similar reaction processes. The purpose of this chapter is to provide a comprehensive overview and a practical guide of rare earth oxide nanomaterial design and characterization, with special focus on the well-established synthetic methods and the conventional and advanced analytical techniques. This chapter addresses each synthetic method with its advantages and certain disadvantages, and specifically provides synthetic strategies, typical procedures and features of resulting nanomaterials for the widely-used chemical methods, such as hydrothermal, solvothermal, sol–gel, co-precipitation, thermal decomposition, etc. For the nanomaterial characterization, a practical guide for each technique is addressed, including working principle, applications, materials requirements, experimental design and data analysis. In particular, electron and force microscopy are illuminated for their powerful functions in determining size, shape, and crystal structure, while X-ray based techniques are discussed for crystalline, electronic, and atomic structural determination for oxide nanomaterials. Additionally, the advanced characterization methodologies of synchrotron-based techniques and in situ methods are included. These non-traditional methods become more and more popular because of their capabilities of offering unusual nanostructural information, short experiment time, and in-depth problem solution. Graphical Abstract :

Waste/residual marine biomass represents a vast and potentially underexplored source of biopolymers chitin/chitosan and alginate. Their isolation and potential application in the development and production of bio-based food packaging are gaining in attractiveness due to a recent increment in plastic pollution awareness. Accordingly, a review of the latest research work was given to cover the pathway from biomass sources to biopolymers isolation and application in the development of active (antimicrobial/antioxidant) film materials intended for food packaging. Screening of the novel eco-friendly isolation processes was followed by an extensive overview of the most recent publications covering the chitosan- and alginate-based films with incorporated active agents.

In this chapter mono, di, tri and tetraaza substituted phenanthrene derivatives have been investigated computationally with B3LYP/6-31 + G(d,p) level of theory. Substitution of carbon atom of the main structure with nitrogen obviously disturbs the aromaticity, indeed it decreases it. Thus, the idea of regaining of the aromaticity back by using electron withdrawing groups came across. As a result of the computational calculations, energetically most unfavored structures have been found to be those where aza substitutiona are vicinal. Secondly, the aromaticities of the present species depend on the position of the centric substituent. In addition, the effect position of the side substituent has been considered. The system becomes more aromatic (possess greater negative NICS values or smaller HOMA value) when the electron withdrawing atoms or groups are adjacent to the centrically substituted heteroatoms.

Bimetallic and multimetallic alloy nanoparticles are emerging as a class of critical nanomaterials in electronic, optical and magnetic fields due to their unique physic-chemical properties. In particular, precise control of the nanoparticle size can endow them with broad versatility and high selectivity. This chapter reviews some tremendous achievements in the development of size controlled bimetallic and multimetallic alloy nanoparticles, with special emphasis on general preparation methods, characterization methodologies and instrumentation techniques. Some key factors and future perspectives on the development of size-controlled bimetallic and multimetallic alloy nanoparticles are also discussed.

There are a lot of different dye classes with complete different chemical structures. On the basis of a common classification the term “polymethine dyes” was created in 1926. Common criteria are a conjugated polymethine chain with terminal functional groups and an odd number 2 n  + 3 of π -centers and 2 n  + 4 π -electrons ( n is the number of vinyl groups), the vinylene shift of the 0–0 vibronic transition of about 100 nm per vinyl group, the influence of substituents or heteroatoms according to Dewar´s Rules and a bathochromic shift by twisting of the polymethine chain according to the Brunings–Corwin effect.