I’ve spent last month trying to prepare first chapters of my doctoral dissertation:

- “Literature review of development of particle-reinforced aluminium matrix composites (AlMCs)”

- and “Materials and experimental procedure”.

During past month I paid attation more into corrosion experiments - I defined SA/SV - sample area to solution volume ratio. It was done based on literature review as well as data acquired in las months.

In the last last month most of the efforts were focused on photochemical methods and AFM trainigs.
Photodeposited Ag nanoparticles density and sizes were determined by AgNO3 solution concentration and illumination time respectively. Insteristing results were obtained when laser light intensity was changed. Low intensity resulted in steady state growth of the circular particles and high intensity resulted in nonsteady state growth and irregular particles shapes.
AFM training included investigations of rughness of polished Si wafers and TiO2 with NPs.

This month I was busy preparing the proposal for grant titled: Evolution of complex loading pre-deformed microstructure and texture of CP titanium during mechanical and thermal treatment, investigated by means of Orientation Microscopy techniques. Should my application prove be successful, I will continue to work on KoBo deformed titanium, but focus on further modifications to the microstructure by means of cold deformation and annealing.

The newest paper is finally available:
http://link.springer.com/article/10.100 ... nlineFirst
Recently I have also started revising my paper on symmetric boundaries.
Besides, there appeared a paper by Bulatov et al. in which
a function for calculation of boundary energy based on geometric parameters is proposed.
It will be interesting to compare their results with populations of boundaries published so far (low-energy boundaries should have high populations).