Luminescent materials are of worldwide interest because of their unique optical properties. Silica, which is transparent to light, is an ideal matrix for luminescent materials. Luminescent silica nanoparticles (LSNs) have broad applications because of their enhanced chemical and thermal stability. Silica spheres of various sizes could be synthesized by different methods to satisfy specific requirements. Diverse luminescent dyes have potential for different applications. Subject to many factors such as quenchers, their performance was not quite satisfying. This review thus discusses the development of LSNs including their classification, synthesis, and application. It is the highlight that how silica improves the properties of luminescent dye and what role silica plays in the system. Further, their applications in biology, display, and sensors are also described.

Boron-doped diamond (BDD) thin film electrodes have great application potential in water treatment. However, the high electrode energy consumption due to high resistance directly limits the application range of existing BDD electrodes. In this paper, the BDD/graphene/BDD (DGD) sandwich structure electrode was prepared, which effectively improved the conductivity of the electrode. Meanwhile, the sandwich electrode can effectively avoid the degradation of electrode performance caused by the large amount of non-diamond carbon introduced by heavy doping, such as the reduction of the electrochemical window and the decrease of physical and chemical stability. The microstructure and composition of the film were characterized by scanning electron microscope (SEM), atomic force microscopy (AFM), Raman spectroscopy, and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). Then, the degradation performance of citric acid (CA), catechol, and tetracycline hydrochloride (TCH) by DGD electrodes was systematically studied by total organic carbon (TOC) and Energy consumption per unit TOC removal (EC_TOC). Compared with the single BDD electrode, the new DGD electrode improves the mobility of the electrode and reduces the mass transfer resistance by 1/3, showing better water treatment performance. In the process of dealing with Citric acid, the step current of the DGD electrode was 1.35 times that of the BDD electrode, and the energy utilization ratio of the DGD electrode was 2.4 times that of the BDD electrode. The energy consumption per unit TOC removal (EC_TOC) of the DGD electrode was lower than that of BDD, especially Catechol, which was reduced to 66.9% of BDD. The DGD sandwich electrode, as a new electrode material, has good electrochemical degradation performance and can be used for high-efficiency electrocatalytic degradation of organic pollutants.

In order to investigate the competitive interaction between nanoparticles and twin, the eutectic Si microstructures in Al–10Si (wt. %) base alloys with exclusive and combined addition of Sr and Sb are characterized by combined TEM and atom probe tomography (APT). The chemical short range order in Sb–Sb and Sb–Sr pairs is revealed by ab initio molecular dynamics simulation, which promotes the formation of clusters and nanoparticles. The coexistence of nanoparticles and twins is observed in Sb containing alloys, with a negative correlation in the corresponding number density, owing to the competitive stacking of precursors and individual atoms at the solid–liquid interface. Large size particles around 70 nm with a uniform distribution of Sr atoms are formed in Al–10Si–0.35Sb–0.015Sr (wt. %) alloys, due to the precursor aggregation and homogeneous nucleation in the droplets that nucleation are depressed. A model for the formation of nanoparticles and their interaction with twins is proposed.

By using the hydrolysis of Al 3+ salt under near-neutral conditions, Al(OH) 3 colloidal solution has been prepared. The polypropylene based ultrafiltration (UF) membrane materials were uniformly coated with Al(OH) 3 colloid via hydraulic spin coating technique. It was indicated that the degree of hydrophobicity of membrane increases with the extension of coating time. The surface of polypropylene membrane with colloidal structure was analyzed by scanning electron microscopy, infrared spectroscopy and field emission scanning electron microscope. Samples characterization with the aid of Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) found that the interaction between colloidal coating and PP membrane is due to the physical force. It was shown that nano-particles are formed on the surface, which increases the surface area and thereby increases the hydrophobicity behavior of the samples.

Polishing pad conditioners are of critical importance in chemical mechanical polishing (CMP), acting as a key determinant of CMP efficiency and an indispensable consumable in the polishing process. In addition to acid–alkali resistance and outstanding stability, stringent requirements are also imposed on the physical properties of conditioners, including high hardness and wear resistance. Diamond films, with their exceptional comprehensive performance, can satisfactorily fulfill these demanding specifications. In this work, to investigate the bonding strength and wear resistance of diamond films deposited on a silicon carbide (SiC) substrate, four groups of diamond films with distinct processing parameters were synthesized via hot wire chemical vapor deposition (HWCVD) on SiC substrates. Nano-scratch tests were employed to characterize the bonding strength at the diamond film/SiC substrate interface, while wear tests under humid conditions with a 500 g load, accompanied by in-depth analysis of the associated wear mechanisms, were conducted. The results demonstrate that diamond films exhibit tremendous application potential as CMP pad conditioners in CMP processes.

Boron-doped diamond thin films exhibit extensive applications in chemical sensing, in which functionalized nanostructures on the surfaces enhances further the performance of these films. However, targets detecting within such nanostructures faces great challenges such as noise, unclear object boundaries, and mutual occlusion, leading to inaccuracies in existing detection models. To tackle these challenges, we optimized the YOLOv8 model and introduced DWS-YOLOv8 for target detection of diamond nanostructures. The integration of the Deformable Convolutional C2f (DCN_C2f) module into the backbone network allowed adaptive adjustment of the network's receptive field. Moreover, incorporating the Shuffle Attention (SA) mechanism effectively addressed detail loss during convolutional iterations and reduced noise's impact on prediction results. Finally, leveraging Wise-IoU (WIoU) v3 as the bounding box regression loss enhanced the model's focus on diamond nanostructure samples, thereby improving localization capability. Experimental results showcase that compared to YOLOv8, our model achieves a 9.4% higher detection accuracy with reduced computational complexity. Furthermore, the recall rate (R) saw an increase of 0.6%, mAP@0.5 improved by 2.6%, and mAP@0.5:0.95 increased by 0.6%. Additionally, DWS-YOLOv8 demonstrated enhancements in precision (P), recall (R), mAP@0.5, and mAP@0.5:0.95, validating the effectiveness of our approach in enhancing target detection performance.