Development of an inter-confirmatory plastic characterization system using spectroscopic techniques for waste management.

Ever-accumulating amounts of plastic waste raises alarming concern over environmental and public health. A practical solution for addressing this threat is recycling, and the success of an industry-oriented plastic recycling system relies greatly on the accuracy of the waste sorting technique adapted. We propose a multi-modal spectroscopic sensor which combines laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) and Raman spectroscopy in a single optical platform for characterizing plastics based on elemental and molecular information to assist the plastic identification-sorting process in recycling industries. The unique geometry of the system makes it compact and cost-effective for dual spectroscopy. The performance of the system in classifying industrially important plastic classes counting PP, PC, PLA, Nylon-1 1, and PMMA is evaluated, followed by the application of the same in real-world plastics comprising PET, HDPE, and PP in different chemical-physical conditions where the system consumes less than 30 ms for acquiring LIBS-Raman signals. The evaluation of the system in characterizing commuting samples shows promising results to be applied in industrial conditions in future. The study on effect of physical-chemical conditions of plastic wastes in characterizing them using the system shows the necessity for combining multiple techniques together. The proposal is not to determine the paramount methodology to characterize and sort plastics, but to demonstrate the advantages of dual-spectroscopy sensors in such applications. The outcomes of the study suggest that the system developed herein has the potential of emerging as an industrial-level plastic waste sorting sensor.

Screen-Printable Electronic Ink of Ultrathin Boron Nitride Nanosheets.

Two-dimensional materials play a vital role in the current electronic industry in the fabrication of devices. In the present work, we have exfoliated and stabilized the insulating hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) by means of a polymer-assisted liquid-phase technique. Further, the highly viscous ink of hBN was prepared, and its printability on various commercially available substrates was studied. The morphology of the printed patterns reveals the layered arrangement of hBN. The various electrical and dielectric characterizations, carried out on a metal-insulator-metal capacitor, testified its potential applications in various fields of printed electronics.

Highly ordered palladium nanodots and nanowires from switchable block copolymer thin films.

We demonstrate a new approach to fabricate highly ordered arrays of nanoscopic palladium dots and wires using switchable block copolymer thin films. The surface-reconstructed block copolymer templates were directly deposited with palladium nanoparticles from a simple aqueous solution. The preferential interaction of the nanoparticles with one of the blocks is mainly responsible for the lateral arrangement of the nanoparticles inside the pores of the templates in addition to the capillary forces. A subsequent stabilization by UV-irradiation followed by pyrolysis in air at 450 degrees C removes the polymer to produce highly ordered metallic nanostructures. We extended this approach to micellar films to obtain metallic nanostructures. This method is highly versatile as the procedure used here is simple, eco-friendly and provides a simple approach to fabricate a broad range of nanoscaled architectures with tunable lateral spacing, and can be extended to systems with even smaller dimensions.