Iron-Based Nanomaterials

This section emphasizes recent research on different aspects of chitosan-based functional nanomaterials, including applications of chitosan-based functional metal nanoparticles (gold, iron oxide, and silica), carbon-based nanomaterials (CNTs, graphene and fullerene), quantum dots, and liposomes for tissue engineering, wound dressing, drug delivery, cancer diagnosis, and some industrial applications. 

There were developed two new technologies for manufacturing of novel carbon nanomaterials (fullerenes, nanotubes, carbonic nanoclusters) based on the idea of high-energy plasmochemistry synthesis with the use of the methods of electrical wire explosion and spark erosion of graphite and metallic materials (nickel, iron, copper) in organic medium. 

Synchrotron-based nnclear resonance methods have revealed the vibrational dynamics of the iron atom in numerous systems, including alloys, amorphous materials, nanomaterials, and materials under high pressure. " The above-mentioned selectivity for the probe nucleus is particularly valuable for biological macromolecules, which may contain many thousands of atoms, bnt a locahzed active site is often the true center of interest. Since its availability, NRVS has been applied to study the vibrational dynamics of Fe in proteins, " porphyrin model compounds, and... 

Synchrotron-based nuclear resonance methods have revealed the vibrational dynamics of the iron atom in numerous systems, including alloys, amorphous materials, nanomaterials, and materials under high pressure. The above-mentioned selectivity for the probe nucleus is particularly valuable for biological macromolecules, which may contain many thousands of atoms, but a localized active site is often the true center of interest. Since its availability, NRVS has been applied to study the vibrational dynamics of Fe in proteins, porphyrin model compounds, " and iron-sulfur clusters. It is shown that NRVS can provide frequencies, amplitudes, and directions for Fe vibrations in the samples. It helps to clarify mode assignments in vibrational spectra and reveals many important vibrational modes of Fe that cannot be seen by other methods. In particular, NRVS reveals low-frequency motions of the Fe down to below 100 cm that control biological reactions. The applications presented here use Fe as the probe nucleus, but the principle applies to other Mossbauer isotopes such as " Sn, Kr, Ni, and Zn if appropriate sources are available. 

Carbon nanotubes (lijima, 1991 Dresselhaus et al., 1996) are a specific type of one-dimensional nanomaterial that has sparked people s imaginations. A cover story in American Scientist magazine a few years ago noted that carbon nanotubes could be used to build a space cable connecting the Earth and moon. News from NASA indicates that, in the near future, spacecraft may be based solely on carbon material—powered by either fuel cells based on carbon materials or lithium-iron batteries based on nanomaterials. Carbon materials also were featured very prominently in the recent national nanotechnology initiative and were mentioned in the President s State of the Union address, in which he referred to carbon nanotubes as a thousand times stronger than steel. 

Three research-based environmental nanotechnology modules have been designed and implemented in an undeigraduate level environmental engineering course. For these modules, we selected two nanomaterials (nanoscale bimetalhc iron particles and engineered nanospheres) that may provide solutions to challenging enviromnental pollution problems (3). Table I shows a summary of each module and its learning objective(s). 

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