The Research of Thermoelectric Materials and Applications
The thermoelectric effect, which is also known as Seebeck Effect. It’s the direct conversion of temperature differences to electric voltage and vice versa. It was found by a German physicist, Thomas Johann Seebeck in 1821. Seebeck found two metal composited compass, during temperature changes, the magnetic field was influenced. Therefore, he named it as thermal magnetic effect . After, the Danish physicist Hans Christian Ørsted, correct it by "thermoelectric effect".
Nowadays, the commercial Thermoelectric Analyzer, SeebeckPro, is also introduced to the market.
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Evaluating Hiding Power of Pigments by A Particle Size Analyzer
The "Hiding Power" of a pigment, also known as hiding strength or coverage, refers to the capacity of a coating or pigment to conceal the underlying surface or previous layers, effectively obscuring the color or pattern of the substrate. When we paint the wall or paintings layer by layer, the top layer of pigment can effectively cover the original color in the lower layer. Take watercolor painting as an example, when we applying opaque watercolor onto an existed color block, it can easily cover the underlying color (opaque watercolor has stronger hiding power), while the transparent watercolor cannot completely cover the lower layer, but it results the artistic effect of color layering or gradient (weak covering power).
The hiding power of pigments are of great significance to the manufacturing industries of paints, art paints, printing, etc., because it determines the ability of covering the surfaces with blemishes or dirt (opaque requirements), or to achieve gradual ability to layer artistic effects (semi-transparent requirements).
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How To Measure The Thermodynamic Stability of Transition Metal Oxide
Understanding of the thermodynamic stability of transition metal oxide nanoparticles, helps to control the physical reactions of such material in a variety of industrial and environmental applications.
By a high-precision calorimeter, one can measure the surface energy of cobalt, iron, manganese, and nickel oxide and results the calorimetric data, and further proof that the nanoscale transition metal oxide, in which the surface energy, can strongly affect the redox equilibria, as well as the phase stability.
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How to Calculate Band Gap of ZnO Nanoparticles by UV-Vis Spectroscopy?
ZnO and the common semiconductor catalyst material, TiO2, both have the advantages of nontoxicity, low cost, and easy to obtain. To explore the effects of material properties towards to the efficiency of photocatalyst, one can measure the optical energy gaps and predict the effect of the photocatalyst materials, such as ZnO.
In order to calculate the optical energy gaps, we need to find out the absorption coefficient with the relative film thickness. By an UV / Vis spectrometer, we can obtain transmittance and reflectance spectra data. Finally, by the Tauc Plot (from those spectra data), we can calculate a precise value of the optical energy gap.
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