We got a very pleasant Easter surprise yesterday :) Our paper "Non-equilibrium transformation of titanate nanowires to nanotubes upon mechanochemical activation" was accepted for publication in RSC Advances (2013) DOI:10.1039/C3RA40863A. This paper reports an important discovery made by Gábor Kozma: titanate nanowires can be transformed back into titanate nanotubes by applying precisely controlled mechanochemical activation. While the nanotube-to-nanowire conversion is a well-known phenomenon, this reverse reaction (nanowire-to-nanotube) is a new and unexpected finding. The importance of this reaction is that it helps us complete the scientific puzzle of titanate nanostructure interconversion pathways.

Good news: our paper Adsorption mechanisms of organic compounds on multiwall carbon nanotubes, written by our friends at the University of Novi Sad, Serbia was accepted for publication in the Chemical Engineering Journal (2013) this week. The first author of the paper is Marijana Kragulj. This is the first paper resulting from our collaboration in the framework of the IPA HU-SRB project "MATCROSS". It is a very fine work discussing the adsorption of nitroaromatics, nonpolar aliphatics,  nonpolar aromatics and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) on different multiwall carbon nanotubes. 

This week certainly ranks among our best-evers as far as papers are concerned :)

Besides the Langmuir paper mentioned in the previous post, two more manuscripts were accepted from our group for publication in Adsorption on Friday. "Fine tuning of titanate nanostructures' surface acidic sites" summarizes the recent work of Dániel Madarász et el. who measured the surface acidity of titanate nanowires by pyridine adsorption and NH3 TPD. Despite the large number of titanate nanostructure related publications  in the literature, this type of data was scarce and difficult to find until now. The acidity of a surface is most important from the heterogeneous catalytic point of view. However, the information will be useful for the solid-fluid interaction research of our Lendület group as well.

The second Adsorption paper was written by Zita Ibolya Papp et al. on the "Effect of planetary ball milling process parameters on the nitrogen adsorption properties of multiwall carbon nanotubes". Specific surface area, pore size distribution and surface fractal dimension were calculated from N2 adsorption-desorption isotherms and compared with nanotube length distribution data derived by TEM image analysis. Ball milling is a facile, industrially available and scaleable way of post-synthetic nanotube property tuning, therefore, we expect these results to be useful for a broad audience interested in nanotube usage. The following figure demonstrates one of the non-trivial findings of this paper: the specific surface area of a ball milled multiwall carbon nanotube sample is inversely proportional with the average nanotube length.

This news is as fresh as it gets :)
Our paper "Rh-induced Support Transformation Phenomena in Titanate Nanowire and Nanotube Catalysts" by J. Kiss et al. was accepted for publication in Langmuir earlier today. We publish here some interesting findings on the difference between the thermal behavior of Rh nanoparticle decorated titanate nanotubes and nanowires. DOI will follow as soon as available.

Our paper "Effects of carbon nanotube functionalization on the agglomeration and sintering of supported Pd nanoparticles" by Robert Puskás et al. was accepted for publication in Adsorption today. Robert has done a nice thorough investigation on the influence of nitric acid treatment of MWCNTs on the palladium nanoparticle size.  The average particle diameter calculated from TEM image analysis was found to be inversely proportional with the duration of the oxidation in nitric acid. Crystallite sizes determined from XRD patterns confirmed this general tendency. These results are expected be useful in improving the reproducibility of carbon nanotube based heterogeneous catalysts. Moreover, the findings will also help us in designing the pore wall chemistry of our porous nano composite materials.

 

Splendid news this week: the fifth (and last) paper presented at EUCMOS 2012 was also accepted for publication in the Journal of Molecular Structure. It is written by Andrea Rónavári et al, the title is "Structure and Stability of Pristine and Bi and/or Sb Decorated Titanate Nanotubes". DOI will be given in the Publications section of this site as soon as available.

The third proceedings paper written by the young colleagues was accepted for publication in the Journal of Molecular Structure today. It is written by Péter Pusztai et al. on the Structural stability test of hexagonal CePO4 nanowires synthesized at ambient temperature. Péter has summarized lots of measurements in this work and succeeded in finding a good spectroscopic approach. All in all, a quite good paper! The DOI is not yet available. I'll publish it in the Publications section of this website as soon as it it assigned to us.

As usual, I got more adsorbed in the daily administrative routine than I wanted to, and therefore, the proceedings papers are not submitted yet :(
Nevertheless, there are good news related to our research group that I am happy to report here:

• First of all, the paper "Luminescence properties of Ho3+ co-doped SrAl2O4:Eu2+, Dy3+ long-persistent phosphors synthesized with a solid-state method"  written by Zoltán Győri has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Molecular Structure. As soon as the DOI is available I'll publish it in the "Publications" section of our homepage. Zoltán has done a lot of work in this subject and summarized it in a nicely written, detailed paper. 
  
• The other major news is that on Friday I went to Budapest and signed the budget rescheduling contract that will allow us to spend a lot more on instrument purchases from our group's total budget in the first year (until June 2013) than originally planned. This is major good news and should help our work a lot.

The last round of FP7 calls is now open, the submission deadlines are spread between the end of October and the middle of December. So far we are involved in two proposals and two more possibilities still open for us. We'll see the outcomes in Spring 2013 – it would certainly be important to collect some Brussels money for the group.

The past week was light – not that I mind after the busy SIWAN days :-) 
Hallowmass is a holiday in Hungary and the subsequent Friday was also declared holiday, therefore, we worked only three days this week. This was filled with lots of discussions and emails, some teaching and some personal errands for me. Highlights of the week from the scientific point of view:

• we have had a joint seminar with our sister MTA-SZTE research group. They introduced some of their recent works in three nice talks.
• affiliates of my group were busy writing the proceedings papers related to their ISSHAC-8 attendance (http://isshac.org). I expect to see several manuscripts in the forthcoming days!
• the paper of Valéria Bugris et al on the "Rehydration of dehydrated CaFe-L(ayered)D(ouble)H(ydroxide) followed by thermogravimetry, X-ray diffractometry and dielectric relaxation spectroscopy" published in the Journal of Molecular Structure went online. It is a nice thorough investigation worth reading here: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.molstruc.2012.10.040