Nanocatalysis

Natural fibers have a wide range of industrial applications, such as in water treatment and for cleaning up oil spills and a variety of other toxic substances such as radioactive materials and toxic metals. Microorganisms or their cell-free enzyme systems can remove metals and radionuclide selectively from dilute waste streams. Biological treatments have been a rapidly growing area of science over the past decade. The acceptance of natural attenuation as a solution for cleaning up contaminated sites. We propose to produce bionanotube from microorganisms’ biosynthesis of hemicelluloses.

A central goal of the heterogeneous catalysis research and a prerequisite for nanotechnology-based rational design of catalysts is to achieve a better fundamental understanding of the functionality of the active catalyst nanoparticles. Scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) has in recent years demonstrated its tremendous value since it provides the means to reveal the real space surface structure of catalytically active nanoclusters in atomic detail, and thereby obtain new and interesting insight into catalysis.

Semiconductor-metal nano composites have been widely employed in photocatalysis, where as the metal, in contact with the semiconductor can store and shuttle photo-generated electrons from the semiconductor to an acceptor in a photocatalytic process, thus greatly enhances the overall photocatalytic efficiency. In most of the catalytic studies, noble metal nano particles were dispersed on an oxide surface, such a catalyst structure, though effective, result in exposing both to reactants and the surrounding medium.

Nanoparticle based plasmonic biosensors have received significant research attention in recent years due to their attractive properties such as easy detection, small detection volume and potential for multiplexing and miniaturization. The biosensing scheme usually builds on the inherent sensitivity of the nanoparticle plasmon resonance to changes in the local dielectric environment[1]. In a biosensor such a change in the local dielectric environment is caused by biomolecule binding or desorption.