Recent Patents on Materials Science - Volume 8, Issue 2, 2015

Due to attractive surface properties and to intrinsic brittleness of Complex Metallic Alloys (CMAs), most of their potential applications involve materials with high surface-to-volume ratios, including thin films and coatings. While physical vapor deposition techniques are efficient for the processing of CMA films on line-of-sight surfaces, chemical vapor deposition (CVD) is well positioned for their application on complex sur Read More

Recognizing quasicrystals that are embedded in Al-based cast alloys is a challenging task. For this reason, we synthesized a series of multi-component, AlMn-based alloys that contain many icosahedral quasicrystals in addition to crystalline phases. We then conducted a thorough investigation in order to unambiguously distinguish the quasicrystalline phases from all the others. Numerous modern analytical techniq Read More

A concept of thermal storage of digital information in a thermal memory cell as described in the patent “Method for storing digital information and storage element” (EP2207177) is presented, where a byte of digital information can be stored into the storage medium by pure thermal manipulation, in the absence of an electric or a magnetic field. Thermal inscription of information employs a specific temperature-time Read More

This manuscript presents our patent for a more effective magnetocaloric material based on Gd5Si2Ge2 as well as its method of production. The material has high refrigeration capacities and, with modifications to its composition, it is possible to control the temperature at which its magnetocaloric effect is the largest. This effect was achieved by modifying the stoichiometry of the starting composition. First, the Si or Read More

This review summaries recent patents on catalysts dealing with quasicrystal. Icosahedral quasicrystal (iQc) Al-Cu-Fe has been studied in terms of catalysis. The Al63Cu25Fe12 iQc (i-AlCuFe) is a promising precursor for Cu catalysts, whose constituent elements, compositions and quasi-periodic structure are in favor of processing high performance catalysts. Brittleness resulting from quasi-periodic structure enables one to obtain Read More

The development of antimicrobial biomaterials based on silver nanoparticles (SNP) has attracted significant interest during the past decade. SNP have demonstrated very beneficial properties, especially antibacterial, antifungal, anti-viral, and anti-inflammatory properties which can be exploited for a range of technical and medical products, for example topical ointments, bandages, stents. Such applications have been d Read More

We systematically investigated the influence of surfactant on processing PEDOT/PSS thin films by spin-coating technique. As a result, the conductivity of the PEDOT/PSS thin films prepared by the two-step spin-coating method was to be averagely ca. 400Scm-1 which was calculated with sheet resistance and thickness. On the other hand, the conductivity of the PEDOT/PSS thin films prepared by the one-step spin-coati Read More