- Oulu, Finland. Invited talk at the one-day nanotechnology Seminar organized by Prof. Dr. Krisztián Kordás at the University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland on 3rd September, 2015.
- Vienna, Austria. Invited talk at the Colloquium organized to honor the 75th birthday of Prof. Dr. Hans Kuzmany (my postdoc supervisor) on 10th September, 2015.
- Warsaw, Poland. Annual meeting of the M-ERA.NET "VOCSENSOR" project. We attended this meeting together with Prof. Dr. Zoltán Kónya and summarized the results of the Szeged node.
I've spent the first half of September traveling in Europe and giving talks. Since I missed the chance to publish the news about these when it was still hot, I will only briefly summarize them for the record here.
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OK, first of all sorry about the long silence in this blog. I've been busy since the end of July and kept postponing writing here. I'll try to make up for it now in a huge batch of news.
The 3rd year report was submitted on time at the end of July. I think we made good progress and managed to publish adequately about nanostructure synthesis and about S/G interface phenomena. We also made good progress with the evaporation profile measurements, but publications in this field are a bit behind schedule. We are actively working to remedy this now. Fluctuation Enhanced Sensing experiments are somewhat behind schedule. It is a tricky field with lots of reproducibility issues. Results will come eventually. The 3 year output of the Porous Nanocomposites group is summarized below:
All in all, I am satisfied with our progress so far and hope to get the chance to continue this Lendület group for two more years. The scorching heat of the past two weeks did not stop science from happening, fortunately :) I'm pleased to report that the first paper of the 4th project year of our Lendület group was accepted for publication in Reaction Kinetics, Mechanisms and Catalysis. This work, titled "Synthesis and 1-butene hydrogenation activity of platinum decorated bamboo-shaped multiwall carbon nanotubes" was written mostly by our former student and colleague Dr. László Vanyorek, who is now assistant lecturer at the University of Miskolcs. Congratulations Laci!
Today is the last day of June, the 3rd year of our "Lendület" project is officially over. What better way to conclude than to report on a new paper? :) The work "Optimization of thiamethoxam adsorption parameters using multi-walled carbon nanotubes by means of fractional factorial design" has been just accepted for publication in Chemosphere. This is a particularly valuable paper for me, because it is my first one co-authored with my Novi Sad friends Sanja Panic and Goran Boskovic. They worked a lot on this topic and I believe that the final paper is an excellent report on the use of design of experiments (DoE) techniques for adsorption optimization. Congratulations and thank you to all co-authors!
This is a blog entry I should have written weeks ago :) On 11 June 2015 the nice people at the Energy Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences have allowed our group to carry out neutron imaging studies of liquid penetration into porous solids at the NIPS-NORMA facility. Erzsébet-Sára Bogya, Dorina Dobó and myself have spent a full day there and enjoyed the excellent science and hospitality of our hosts. The collected data will be evaluated in the forthcoming weeks and I seriously hope that this day was only the beginning of a fruitful long-term cooperation. Special thanks to Zoltán Kis, László Szentmiklósi and Tamás Belgya for making this all possible!
The best way to conclude the week is to report on the acceptance of a new paper :) I'm pleased to report that our paper Visible light activation photocatalytic performance of PbSe quantum dot sensitized TiO2 Nanowires was accepted for publication in Applied Catalysis B - Environmental today. Zoltán Győri has really broken new ground with this nice work, congratulations!
Excellent news to close this week :) Our paper "Unveiling the Role of CNTs on the Phase Formation of 1D Ferroelectrics" was accepted for publication in Langmuir yesterday. This work was done in cooperation with the group of Prof. Paula Vilarinho from the University of Aveiro, Portugal. We are very happy about the paper and look eagerly forward to continuing our collaboration.
Our new 3D printer, a bq Witbox is finally operational. We are very excited about the possibilities of this new technology and look forward to learning what it can do for the group.
I'm happy to report that Valéria Bugris, ex-member of our group has successfully defended her PhD thesis yesterday. The title of her work is "Dehydration-rehydration induced structural changes in pristine and composite layered double hydroxides". I acted as a co-supervisor for Valéria together with Dr. István Pálinkó. Valéria has received lots of help in the dielectric relaxation spectroscopy part of her work from Dr. Henrik Haspel. Congratulations Valy and all the bests for your profession career!
Today marks a major improvement in our nanotechnology research infrastructure: our brand new Malvern Zetasizer DLS instrument was installed! This unit is the quasi-standard in the industry for dynamic light scattering particle size distribution analysis and I'm really happy that we finally have our own system. The purchase was made possible by the OTKA projects K 112531 and NK 106234, but the unit will be fully accessible for the research purposes of the "Lendület" group as well.
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AuthorÁkos Kukovecz is associate professor of chemistry and Head of the MTA-SZTE Lendület Porous Nanocomposites Research Group. He works at Szeged, Hungary. Archives
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