This course book provides a brief overview of important nanomaterial properties (size, charge or surface potential, and agglomeration behavior) and standards that apply to defining and characterizing nanomaterials. The book includes activities for synthesizing nanomaterials and investigating their agglomeration behavior. The book also presents five laboratories on analytical methods to measure of nanoparticle size distributions and surface potential, with emphasis on applying standards to inform the sample preparation, sample measurement, and data analysis and interpretation.<\/p>\n
The course materials were developed over the course of two offerings of a graduate level course (CIVE 7397 Experimental Methods in Nanomaterials Engineering) in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Houston. Although the example applications in the course book focus on environmental and biomedical applications, the course content is expected to be generally applicable to any field in which nanomaterials or colloidal materials. Graduate and undergraduate students from several disciplines (environmental engineering, materials science engineering, civil engineering, geotechnical engineering, electrical engineering, chemistry, and biochemistry) have participated in either the full course, the laboratories conducted as part of the course, or training and application of the course materials in research projects.<\/p>\n
Special acknowledgement is made to the following people who assisted in course book preparation and review: Nusrat Antora (University of Houston) for transcription of equations from the course lectures; Tchemongo (Kissa) Bert\u00e9 (University of Houston) for testing interactive activities in the course book; Shwetha Jayakumar (University of Houston), Abigail Fick (Houston Christian University), and Khang (Kevin) Quach (Houston Christian University) for setting up and photographing the course activities and providing proofreading comments; and Dr. Illya Medina-Velo (Houston Christian University) for support towards student participation. I also appreciate all students who participated in the course and helped in identifying areas in which the course material or laboratories could be improved. Finally, I would like to convey gratitude toward my prior PhD and postdoctoral mentors, Dr. Gregory V. Lowry and Dr. Robert D. Tilton (Carnegie Mellon University) and Dr. Vincent A. Hackley (National Institute of Standards and Technology), for introducing me to this field and passing along much of the knowledge that I have attempted to convey in this course book.<\/p>\n
This course book was prepared under award number 70NANB22H206 from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, U.S. Department of Commerce. The statements, findings, conclusions, and recommendations are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Institute of Standards and Technology or the U.S. Department of Commerce.<\/p>\n
No AI tools were utilized in the writing or preparation of any portion of this coursebook. The course content was developed in Spring 2023 and Spring 2025. The online coursebook was written in Summer to Fall 2025.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"menu_order":1,"template":"","meta":{"pb_show_title":"","pb_short_title":"","pb_subtitle":"","pb_authors":[],"pb_section_license":""},"front-matter-type":[12],"contributor":[],"license":[],"class_list":["post-16","front-matter","type-front-matter","status-publish","hentry","front-matter-type-introduction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/libraryresources.nse.org.ng\/nanoengineering\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/front-matter\/16","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/libraryresources.nse.org.ng\/nanoengineering\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/front-matter"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/libraryresources.nse.org.ng\/nanoengineering\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/front-matter"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libraryresources.nse.org.ng\/nanoengineering\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/libraryresources.nse.org.ng\/nanoengineering\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/front-matter\/16\/revisions"}],"metadata":[{"href":"https:\/\/libraryresources.nse.org.ng\/nanoengineering\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/front-matter\/16\/metadata\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/libraryresources.nse.org.ng\/nanoengineering\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"front-matter-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libraryresources.nse.org.ng\/nanoengineering\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/front-matter-type?post=16"},{"taxonomy":"contributor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libraryresources.nse.org.ng\/nanoengineering\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/contributor?post=16"},{"taxonomy":"license","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libraryresources.nse.org.ng\/nanoengineering\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/license?post=16"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}