Sharif Digital Repository

Polycarbonate (PC) and polyethylene-terephthalate (PET) are important engineering thermoplastics. During last decades these polymers and their blends have been studied extensively due to their wide range of applications. Blends of PET and PC combine mechanical properties and chemical resistance together, which make applicable in various components such as automotive, electrical and of medical parts. It has been accepted that PET/PC immiscible blends are subjected to transesterification reactions during thermal processing, which produces PET-PC copolymer chains. In fact, scissioning and substitution of ester/carbonate functional groups of PC and PET at the interface, transforms the initial... 

Fighting contagious microbial diseases is considered a serious health issue, which has attracted much attention in worldwide. Thus, development of new materials based on nanostructures as a new generation of antibiotics to address this challenge has been of interest to researchers in recent years. Nanostructures based on metallic oxide semiconductors such as oxides with light absorption, production of electron-hole pairs in needle like structures cause tearing bacterial membrane and eventually destroy the bacterium. To this end, we designed experiments to study mechanism and physics governing the process of bacterial degradation to determine the best conditions for inhibiting bacteria... 

Textile industry wastewaters are one of the important sources of environmental contamination because they produce large quantities of highly colored effluents. In recent years, use of advanced oxidation processes by producing highly active and reactive components such as hydroxyl radicals has been proposed. In this study, two oxygenated photocatalytic systems including UV/ZnO and UV/TiO2 were examined for degradation of C.I. reactive orange 16 dye as a typical organic pollutant in textile effluents. A thin gap annular photoreactor was designed and applied for the experiments. The photoreactor provided large surface area exposed to UV light, where in the solution layer renewal on the UV... 

The aim of conducting this research is to study, fabrication and photocatalytic application of electrospun ZnO-based composite nanofibers. One of the most important challenges is to apply photocatalyst under solar irradiation and improve its activity for pollutant degradation. ZnO is a wide band gap semiconductor, hence, it is not active under the visible light. In Iran, we have at least 300 sunny days in a year. Therefore, fabrication and application of photocatalytic material with activity under the sunlight which contains 47% of visible light is so vital in our country. Since CuO is a visible light active photocatalyst and its interface with ZnO forms a type I heterojunction, this... 

Due to the increasing number of Advanced Oxidation Processes (AOPs) that are exploited to eliminate emerging and recalcitrant contaminants from water supplies, photocatalytic degradation of Reactive Blue 21 dye using Zinc Oxide nanoparticles is investigated in both a slurry phase and an immobilized photoreactor. The structural and optical properties of the prepared ZnO nanoparticles were examined by X-ray Diffraction (XRD), Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) and UV-Visible Diffuse Reflectance Spectroscopy (UV-vis DRS). The effects of photocatalyst concentration, calcination temperature, pH and UV lamps were optimized in the slurry phase photoreactor. It was shown that 250 ppm of ZnO that was... 

In this thesis, first, random lasing in a three dimensional disordered medium has been simulated using FDTD method and some properties of random lasers which were observed by others in the previous experiments have theoretically been shown. Our simulation results show that when the density of particles increases to an upper limit, the intensity of lasing modes is enhanced. Also, the effects of pumping rate and particle size on the number of lasing modes and their intensity are studied. Lasing threshold of laser modes in different disordered systems is calculated and it is shown that by an appropriate selection of the central frequency of gain line-shape, the output power intensity of random... 

Hexavalent chromium ion (Cr+6) is a very toxic type of heavy metal in industrial effluents which is not biodegradable and accumulates in the human body that can cause genetic mutations and cancer. The aim of this project is to investigate the effect of wavelength and intensity of appropriate light on the reaction rate of photocatalytic reduction of Cr+6 ion to less toxic materials. In this project, we first designed and constructed a photocatalytic reactor to investigate the effect of wavelength and intensity of incident light on the reaction rate. The home-made photocatalytic reactor consisted of 120 LEDs in 12 different wavelengths, which has ability to control the intensity and... 

Herein, we report an efficient one-pot four-component reaction of commercially available 1,3-dicarbonyl compounds, aromatic aldehydes, amines, and nitromethane in the presence of ZnO nanoparticles, which leads to highly substituted pyrroles in moderate to good yields. A mild and efficient tandem process for the synthesis of highly substituted α-pyrones starting from 2-arylacetic acid of high com-mercial availability has been developed. The synthesis is based on the Knoevenagel condensation of 1,3-cyclohexadiones to various β-keto-Esters, followed by lactonization in the presence of 20 mol% ZnO as a nanocatalyst. Moderate to high yields, easily available and less expensive starting materials... 

In this project, the photoelectrochemical properties of ZnO nanostructures modified by CdS and Graphene was studied. Firs, titanium foil was cut into rectangular shape with 1cm width and 3 cm length, cleaned by rinsing in acetone and ethanol and annealed at 4000C for an hour. As a result, a thin layer of titanium oxide was formed on Ti sheet. Then a layer of grapheme oxide was deposited on substrate using Electrophoretic deposition (EPD). After that, ZnO nanostructure was deposited on the TiO2 substrate using Electropulsation (EP) with 20 consecutive pulse followed by 3 minutes Electrodeposition (ED). Using SEM analysis, the morphology of ZnO was determined to be nanopetals in which the... 

ZnO is a wide and direct band gap (3.37 eV) semiconducting material with a large exciton binding energy (60 meV). It has been extensively studied in the last few years owing to its potential applications in various fields such as surface acoustic wave devices (SAW), transparent electrode, solar cell windows, photovoltaic devices, gas sensors and photoelectrochemical cells. Recently, much attention has been paid to rare-earth (RE) doped ZnO for possible applications in visible emitting phosphors in displays, high power lasers, and other optoelectronic devices. In this thesis, initially ZnO thin films were deposited on glass and ITO substrates using sol-gel dip-coating method. Optical and... 

In this research, the synthesis of the electrospum nano fiber doped zinc oxide and its photocatalyst usage was investigated. The band gap of the zinc oxide in the area of UV leads to deactivation of this material at the visible light. With due the attention to sunny weather in Iran and the fact that about 50 percentage of sunlight is visible light, producing and usage of catalyst materials actived at visible light is economical. Doping is one of the ways of activating ZnO at visible light, so in this research thiourea is used as the source of ZnO doping. The results of the expriments done at visible light and also spectrums of DRS, XPS and XRD prove that the doping is happened. Also, in this... 

Photocatalysts are compounds that can perform oxidation and reductions in the presence of light. One of the most known applications for photocatalyst is degrading organic contaminants in wastewater and making them harmless to the environment.In this project, a magnetic photocatalyst based on Fe3O4@ZnO/N-RGO has been synthesized and characterized with FT-IR, FE-SEM and EDS, XRD, and TGA. Moreover, photocatalytic dye degradation reactions for Rhodamine B, Methylene Blue, and Methyl Orange have been investigated and compared in the presence of Fe3O4@ZnO/N-RGO, Fe3O4@ZnO/RGO, Fe3O4@ZnO, and ZnO. Furthermore, the performance of the photocatalyst has been studied for 5 consecutive reactions and... 

Recently, some wound dressings have been designed that are expected to enhance the wound healing process and prevent blood bleeding and infection. Polymeric dressings have attracted attention due to their biocompatibility, biodegradability, lack of toxicity, and non-allergenic nature. There is widespread interest in using silk fibroin (SF) for this purpose because of its unique properties. Given these points, we have designed an injectable antioxidant hydrogel wound dressing based on SF and Polydopamine(PDA) modified ZnO nanoparticles. First, ZnO nanoparticles were doped with Cu and then modified with PDA (ZnCuO@PDA). XRD, FTIR, SEM, and TEM characterizations were carried out to confirm the... 

ZnO nanopowder has been successfully synthesized by a microwave-assisted solution approach using Zn(CH3CO2)2.2H2O and NaOH. The results obtained from XRD, SEM and TEM show that the mean particle size is 30 nm. SEM and TEM micrographs of ZnO nanopowder also reveal that nanoparticles have spherical shape. A convenient one-pot multi-component reaction of aromatic aldehydes, enolizable ketones or β-keto esters and acetonitrile in the presence of acetyl chloride and 10 mol % ZnO nanoparticles for the synthesis of β-acetamido ketones/esters at room temperature is described. Catalytic activity of ZnO nanopowder for o-acylation of alcohol and phenol has also been investigated. On the other hand,... 

According to the growth in the world population and the decrease in fossil fuels resources and also according to the pollution caused by these unrenewable resources, using hydrogen as an alternative energy resource seems to be unavoidable. In the past decades, semi-conductor metal oxides were being used widely in the energy domain of study, due to their appropriate band gap in the ultra-violet and visible spectra. Among these metal oxides, ZnO has been under special attention because of its electron mobility and its reasonable production cost and also its friendliness to environment. But the high band gap of ZnO (3.2 eV) has impeded its use in visible light spectrum. In this project,... 

Water-gas shift reaction (CO(g) + H2O(g) ↔ CO2(g) + H2(g)) is performed as the key step in the hydrogen and ammonia industrial plant. In this work, Fe/Cr/Cu high temperature water gas shift catalysts were synthesized by coprecipitation method, using sulfate precursors, in order to improve the catalytic performance and particular emphasis is placed on the catalytic activity affected by aging time, precipitating agent and ways of increasing the mechanical strength. Finally the prepared and industrial catalysts were compared when they were situated in the operating conditions (at 360oC and 2 bar) and were characterized by BET, XRD, TPR, TEM and crushing strength analysis. Catalysts being made... 

Aerobic oxidation plays important role in industrial processes and pollutant remediation. The catalysts accelerating oxidation reaction rate are included thermal (typical) catalysts such as Pt or Au on oxide supports and photocatalysts such as TiO2 or ZnO. Although well-studied Au/TiO2 system have been under deep
investigations but Au/ZnO system have less investigated because Au/ZnO has low activity relative to Au/ZnO. Gold nanoparticles supported on ZnO nanostructures were prepared through a simple chemical-thermal method and characterized by SEM, TEM, XRD, BET and photo luminescence (PL) spectroscopy. Effect of
annealing temperature on catalytic activity of these Au/ZnO... 

The purpose of this project is to construct a gas sensor based on one-dimensional nanostructured electrodes of copper oxide. By creating of these nanostructures, can be reduced breakdown voltage of gases, including flammable, to a few hundred volts. The CuO nanowires were grown by thermal oxidation on copper substrate to form self-assembled. In this method, by heating the copper foil,Cu2O also was formed on substrate. Effects of surface tension of substrate and oxidation temperature on surface density and structure of the nanowires were studied. SEM images taken from the samples showed that the surface tensions increases the density of nanowires and increasing the oxidation temperature leads... 

In this research we focus on study and fabrication of ZnO composite nanofibers by electrospinning method for photocatalytic application. The most important challenges in the field of photocatalyst are photocatalytic activity under the visible light and efficiency enhancement. ZnO is a wide band gap semiconductor and it is not active under the visible light. In Iran, we have more than 300 sunny days in a year. Therefore fabrication and application of photocatalytic material with activity under the sun light that contained 40% of visible light is so vital in our country. In the first part of this project, ZnO-CNT nanofibers were fabricated and carbon doped in the crystal lattice of the ZnO.... 

In this study, transparent conductive thin film of Aluminum doped ZnO (ZnO:Al) have been fabricated thorough RF sputtering. The main goal of fabrication of these layers is achieving thin films with minimum resistivity and maximum optical transparency in visible range of spectrum employing as transparent electrodes and buffer layer at the entirely oxidized solar cells. To achieve the suitable structure, various parameters including pressure, power and the thickness of the deposition and annealing on morphologies of thin film has been investigated. According to these results, thin film of ZnO:Al has the transparency of 80% in the visible light range . Doping of ZnO with Aluminum caused...