Mineral Liquid Crystals from Self-Assembly of Anisotropic Nanosystems

Large-scale self-assembled zirconium phosphate smectic layers via a simple spray-coating process

“…Surface tension driven selfassembly of colloidal particles at the liquid-air 31,48,49 and liquidliquid interfaces 30 have been reported, but these are often slow processes that produce ordered assemblies limited to the interfacial region. Instead, the sterically stabilized nanoplatelets of this work form liquid crystalline phases throughout the solvent-free epoxy liquid 9,50,51 . This is demonstrated by the bulk liquid epoxy containing f ¼ 0.040 of sterically stabilized a-ZrP (Fig.…”

Selective synthesis of CdWO4 short nanorods and nanofibers and their self-assembly

“…First, according to the Onsager's theory, minimizing the excluded volume per particle in the array can maximize the entropy of the self-organized structure and the higher sum of van der Waals forces along the nanorods' lengths compared with their tip that would lead these rods to preferrebly align parallelly [13,28,29], so the ordered structure strongly depended on the particle anisotropy. The second can be described as ''oriented attachment'' in which nanostructures can form larger structures via joining appropriate crystal faces, which has already been known in recent years [27] and some examples relative to this mechanism have been reported, such as TiO 2 [27,30,31], FeOOH [32], bCo(OH) 2 [33], ZnS [34], ZnO [35] and ZnWO 4 [36].…”

Seeded growth of monodisperse gibbsite platelets to adjustable sizes

“…Firstly, it is an important semi-manufacture product from the Bayer process in the aluminum production [1][2][3]. Studies on Bayer liquors are largely motivated by the importance to improve the crystallization.…”