Electrospinning and electrospray are both nano-scale material fabrication techniques, based on related phenomena of electrically charged fluid spray from a droplet of liquid. Material is dissolved in liquid, then a spray is generated by applying a high voltage, creating an electric field, between the fluid dispensing capillary and a grounded...
Analytical techniques are utilized in a wide variety of applications. Traditionally, analytical measurements are achieved by trained personnel in a laboratory setting using expensive scientific instruments, which limits their applicability in resource-limited areas and point-of-care applications. Therefore, the concept of enabling these laboratory-based qualitative and quantitative assays in microfluidic device...
Analytical chemistry is an area of chemistry primarily focused on the study and use of instruments for separation, identification, and quantification of an analyte of interest. Specifically, separation science within analytical chemistry often refers to the process of dividing mixtures into their small component parts based on differences in their...
Miniaturized and portable microfluidic analytical platforms have been widely explored in the broad field of chemical analysis. The concept of microfluidics offer a number of important advantages, including low reagent consumption, low-cost detection, high sample throughput, and shorter analysis time. Semiconductor nanocrystals or quantum dots have been extensively utilized in...
The overall concept of reducing laboratory operations to a scale that fits on a single microfluidic chip has been an attractive area of research over the last several decades. Despite a surge in research, few commercial success stories have been written. Lab-on-a-chip technologies have the capability to be cost effective...
There has been a tremendous growth in interest in carbon nanodots (C-dots) in the past several years. As a nascent nanomaterial, C-dots have shown great promise in applications that benefit from their superior water dispersibility, low toxicity, non-blinking fluorescent output, chemical and biological compatibility, ease of functionalization and resistance to...
Since their discovery in the 1990s, the great potential of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) has made them a focus of many research endeavors, including their application as components of biosensors. The inherent chemical "inertness" of CNTs makes their application to biosensing a challenge. It is necessary to "decorate" their surfaces to...
A system to reversibly extract Pb²⁺ ions from aqueous solutions using spiropyran functionalized nanofibers was proposed. Spiropyrans are photochromic compounds which undergo a conformational change that alters their physical properties and makes Pb²⁺ binding possible upon irradiation with UV light (365 nm). Irradiation with green light (525 nm) reverses this...
The intriguing size- and shape dependent properties of nanoparticles have garnered recent attention in many science and engineering areas. When the particle size is in the nanometer size range, the material exhibits very different properties such as surface plasmon resonance (of gold nanoparticles) and superparamagnetism (of iron oxide nanoparticles). The...
Continued interest in the development of miniaturized and portable analytical platforms necessitates the exploration of sensitive methods for the detection of trace analytes. Nanomaterials, on account of their unique physical and chemical properties, are not only able to overcome many limitations of traditional detection reagents but also enable the exploration...