Insect pheromones belong to a category of organic compounds called semiochemicals. Insects use these natural substances to communicate with each other in many aspects of their life cycle, such as finding food, attracting mates or warning each other about predators. Several methods developed in pest management rely on the way pheromones function in insects. Especially, sex pheromones that insects release to attract mates are of utmost importance for pest control. Insecticides based on sex pheromones are called attracticides, and the developed strategy is known as the “attract and kill” method. Our laboratory’s research aims to produce pheromones for field – scale bioassays synthetically. Due to this fact, large-scale reactions are carried out with the minimum stages as possible to synthetically produce gram quantities of insect pheromones in an economical, efficient and less time-consuming way. Additionally, the pheromone activity is closely related to its stereochemistry. That’s why we strive for the enantioselective synthesis of sex pheromones at a satisfactory enantiomeric purity with methods such as Sharpless asymmetric dihydroxylation and lipase-catalyzed asymmetric acetylation.

The aim of this Diploma Thesis is to study the hydration mechanism of lime-pozzolan-cement compositesmixtures, modified with carbon nanostructures (graphene oxide-GO) and polycarboxylate-based superplasticizer (PC).

The addition of carbon nanostructures to in the binder of mortars aims to strengthen their microstructure at the nanoscale, as well as to utilize the properties of carbon nanomaterials for the development of innovative repair mortars that will have improved mechanical properties and the capacity of sensing and piezoelectric response to mechanical loads and thus acting as material embedded sensors (smart mortars).

In the case of GO addition, the results showed the enhancement and the acceleration of hydration (XRD, TG/DSC, IC), the integration of GO within hydrated products (SEM) and the coating of their surface with hydrated phases (TEM). These results were associated with the high specific surface area of GO as well as with the nucleation sites and substrates it offers through its oxygen functional groups (nucleation effect). 

Regarding the addition of PC, a delay effect on early hydration was observed through isothermal calorimetry (IC) measurements, while the subsequent production of hydrated products exhibited similar rate to those of reference mixtures (TG/DSC, XRD).

“Electromagnetic characterization of small scale wind turbine with double side topology”, Department of Physics, University of Athens, Supervisor M. Pissa,. completed in (2021)