Silver (Ag) ornamented TiO2 semiconducting nanoparticles were synthesized through the sol-gel process to be utilized as nanofillers with photo resin to enhance the mechanical and thermal properties of stereolithography 3D printed objects. The as-prepared Ag-TiO2 nanoparticles (Ag-TNP) were typified and qualified by XRD, XPS, Raman, and FESEM; TEM analysis dissected the morphologies. The enhancement in the tensile and flexural strengths of SLR/Ag-TNP nanocomposites was noted as 60.8% and 71.8%, respectively, at the loading content of 1.0% w/w Ag-TNP within the SLR (stereolithography resin) matrix. Similarly, the thermal conductivity and thermal stability were observed as higher for SLR/Ag-TNP nanocomposites, equated to neat SLR. The nanoindentation investigation shows an excerpt hike in reduced modulus and hardness by the inclusion of Ag-TNP. The resulted thermal analysis discloses that the introduction of Ag-TNP can appreciably augment the glass transition temperature (Tg), and residual char yield of SLR nanocomposites remarkably. Hence, the significant incorporation of as-prepared Ag-TNP can act as effective nanofillers to enhance the thermal and mechanical properties of photo resin.

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Synthesis of low cost, durable and efficient electrocatalysts that support oxygen evolution reaction (OER) and hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) are the bottlenecks in water electrolysis. Here we propose a strategy for the development of controllably alloyed, porous, and low density nickel (Ni) and cobalt (Co) based alloys - whose electrocatalytic properties can be tuned to make them multifunctional. Ni and Co based alloy with the chemical structure of Ni1Co2 is identified as an efficient OER catalyst among other stoichiometric structures in terms of over potential @ 10 mAcm−2 (1.629 V), stability, low tafel slope (87.3 mV/dec), and high Faradaic efficiency (92%), and its OER performance is also found to be on par with the benchmarked IrO2. Tunability in the porous metal synthesis strategy allowed the incorporation of graphene during the Ni sponge formation, and the Ni- incorporated nitrogen doped graphene sponge (Ni-NG) is found to have very high HER activity. A water electrolysis cell fabricated and demonstrated with these freestanding electrodes is found to have high stability (>10 hours) and large current density (10 mAcm−2 @ 1.6 V), opening new avenues in the design and development of cost effective and light weight energy devices.