Nanocrystalline grains have proven to be excellent reinforcing elements in nanostructured particulate materials. On the other hand, carbon allotropes, especially graphene and carbon nanotube (CNT), exhibit elastic modulus in the range of 1 TPa (theoretical) and tensile strength in multiple orders greater than that of steel. This study aims at synthesizing high-strength nanostructured ceramic-metallic (cermet) particle feedstock in a high-energy mechanical alloying (HE-MA) process based on an Al-graphene composite comprehensive design-of-experiments (DoE). The goal is to optimize milling process parameters, including milling time, batch composition, ball-to-power (BPR) ratio, and milling agent, for the particles to be eventually fed into a high-pressure cold spray coatings development. The milled powders are characterized using SEM, EDS, XRD, and laser particle diffractometer to study the morphology and microstructure, elemental composition, grain size and crystal orientation, and particle size distribution (PSD), respectively. Results show it was possible to attain required structure and PSD at a 10:1 BPR with 5-mm diameter ball, at 1200 rpm, and 4 h of milling.

Milk whey (MW) represents the major by-product of cheese industry. One possibility to recycle the MW wastes is the use of their globular proteins (MWPs) as a polymer source for the production of biodegradable plastic materials. MWP-based films are usually obtained by protein heat treatment in the presence of glycerol (GLY) as plasticizer at pH 7, a method which would require commercially high costing process. In this work it was exploited the possibility to produce manageable MW-derived biomaterials without any heat-treatment but under alkaline conditions. Our results demonstrated that the casting at pH 12 of the unheated MWP film forming solutions (FFSs), containing either 40% or 50% GLY, led to produce more resistant and flexible biomaterials than the ones obtained at pH 7. Also film transparency was observed significantly improved, being lower in the samples obtained at alkaline pH without MWP heating and with higher GLY concentrations. Finally, moisture content decreased with the reduction of GLY content, both in heated and unheated MWP-based films, whereas water uptake of the different films prepared at pH 12 did not significantly change.

A car-roof photovoltaic has enormous potential to change our society. With this technology, 70% of a car can run on the solar energy collected by the solar panel on its roof.

Since it is to be accepted the majority of the customers, it should be painted as the normal car-painting. This paper estimated the energy yield loss by the automotive painting and setting the goal of the energy conversion efficiency with coated photovoltaic on the car-roof.

The estimation is not as simple as the spectroscopic transparency calculation but needs to consider angular weighting, the curvature of the panel, mismatching loss by the advanced multi-junction solar cells. To estimate the practical value of the target performance, we first monitored the PV module using three-junction solar cell (30 % efficiency) in outdoor for three years. We also developed the new energy yield model, because the conventional model only considers irradiance and temperature.

The newly-developed model successfully explained the seasonal trend of the energy yield of the spectrum-and-angular sensitive three-junction photovoltaic module. We also combined the ray-tracing simulation for consideration of the curvature of the car-roof. With the new and validated (by 3 years) energy generation model, we could define the target base PV efficiency for several car-painting, like blue, gold, red, green and grey.

The nature continues to inspire scientists to adapt solutions in order to satisfy the human needs and attain unreachable performances with new technologies. In this study, the super-hydrophobicity of the Lotus leaf is our source of inspiration. The duplication of this natural phenomenon may enhance the maritime metallic surfaces corrosion and its mechanical friction. In our case, we are investigating super-hydrophobic maritime surfaces using a simple, low cost and scalable coating method. A hydrothermal method is used to create zinc oxide (ZnO) nanorods (NRs) and an evaporation method to apply the Octadecyltrimethoxysilane (ODS). At the end, the super-hydrophobic surface (SHS) is obtained on a maritime aluminum substrate coated by a commercial epoxy paint. The characterization of our SHS gives high water contact angle (WCA) and small sliding angle (SA) of water droplets on the treated surface. We have raised the WCA of the epoxy painted aluminum surface from 98° to more than 152° and reduce the SA of 46° to lower than 7°. We have also studied the sliding speed (SS) that have been largely raised from 0.04 m s⁻¹ in the epoxy case to 1.3 m s⁻¹ after treatment.

Corrosion testing is a very important step in quality control for metal industrial processes. Especially for electroplated goods, corrosion resistance is a primary indicator of surface quality. International Standard Organization has established several standards that use Electrochemical Impedance Spectroscopy (EIS), alone or combined with other electrochemical techniques, to determine corrosion resistance of metal surfaces such ISO 16773 for testing coated and uncoated metallic specimens and ISO 17463 specially designed for organic-coated metal surfaces. EIS is a versatile procedure for the accelerated evaluation of the anti-corrosion performance of coatings: unlike other standard procedures is generally a non-destructive method. EIS works applying an electrical sinusoidal perturbation with a fixed frequency and measuring electrical impedance Z of the sample. Measuring impedance at different frequencies and analysing the data it is possible to postulate the structure of an equivalent circuit and extract corrosion resistance data. This approach is commonly used for high-impedance coatings, in this study we will explore EIS as well as the OCP measurement, the corrosion current and other techniques to find the best option for low-impedance metallic coatings analysis. The objective of this study is to develop a method to determine corrosion resistance for electroplated goods that can give results as reliable as other more diffuse and traditional destructive corrosion testing techniques (such as corrosion tests in artificial atmosphere ISO 9227 and ISO 17228) with a non-destructive process and in a fair less amount of time.