The chemical binding of photocatalytic materials, such as TiO₂ and ZnO nanoparticles, onto porous polymer membranes requires a series of chemical reactions and long purification processes, which often result in small amounts of trapped nanoparticles with reduced photocatalytic activity. In this work, a chemical vapor deposition technique was investigated in order to allow the nucleation and growth of ZnO and TiO₂ nanoparticles onto polyvinylidene difluoride (PVDF) porous membranes for application in advanced oxidation processes. The thickness of obtained surface coatings by sputtered nanoparticles was found to depend on process conditions. The photocatalytic efficiency of sputtered membranes was tested against both a model drug and a model organic pollutant in a small continuous flow reactor.

Nanoparticle dispersions in liquid crystalline materials at low concentrations allow both investigating the formation of defects in liquid crystal (LC) and enhancing the light-scattering properties of LC optical devices. Reverse mode LC dispersions are LC devices, which look like transparent in their OFF state, when no electric field is applied, and opaque in their ON state. In this paper, a new reverse mode device, formed by a dispersion of a LC mixture in a silica nanoparticle crosslinked network, is presented. The morphology and the electro-optical properties of these silica nanoparticle/LC composites were investigated for two different LC mixtures with a negative dielectric anisotropy. The observed transmittances and relaxation times were found to depend strongly on the silica amount and chemical–physical properties of LC used in the sample preparation.

Reverse morphology polymer dispersed liquid crystal (PDLC) films are liquid crystal dispersions in a polymer network, whose voids and crevices are filled by liquid crystal. If they are prepared with homeotropic alignment, they can give rise to transparent electro-optical devices, which can be turned into an opaque state by application of a suitable electric field. They can be easily prepared by polymerisation of mixtures of liquid crystalline monomers and liquid crystals. In this paper we have doped reverse morphology PDLCs with increasing amounts of single-walled carbon nanotubes and investigated their effects on the morphology, electro-optical properties, and conductivity of the PDLC films. The influence of a different initial alignment of liquid crystal (homeotropic, homogeneous, and random) has also been studied.