Credit: Reprinted with permission from Langmuir 2021, 37, 151-159. Copyright (2021) American Chemical Society
Aqueous free-radical precipitation polymerization is one of the most useful methods to prepare the uniformly sized hydrogel microspheres (microgels), and an understanding of the polymerization mechanism is crucial to control the structure or physicochemical properties of microgels. However, the details of the mechanism of precipitation polymerization remain unclear.
Thus, first author Yuichiro Nishizawa, Prof. Daisuke Suzuki of the Graduate School of Textile Science & Technology, Shinshu University and Prof. Takayuki Uchihashi of Nagoya University set out to clarify the formation mechanism of microgels during precipitation polymerization by evaluating structural evolution and thermoresponsiveness of developing microgels during the polymerization and by visualization of polymerization directly.
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IMAGE: Experimental setup for visualizing water flow in tire grooves, along with some sample results. view more
Credit: Serge Simoens
WASHINGTON, March 2, 2021 When a vehicle travels over a wet or flooded road, water builds up in front of the tire and generates a lift force. In a phenomenon known as hydroplaning, this force can become large enough to lift the vehicle off the ground.
In
Physics of Fluids, by AIP Publishing, scientists from the CNRS, the University of Lyon, and The Michelin Group use a laser imaging technique to study water flow in front of and through tire grooves.
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IMAGE: An illustration of physically confined spaces in a porous bilayer silica film on a metal catalyst that can be used for chemical reactions. Silicon atoms are indicated by the orange. view more
Credit: Brookhaven National Laboratory
UPTON, NY Physically confined spaces can make for more efficient chemical reactions, according to recent studies led by scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory. They found that partially covering metal surfaces acting as catalysts, or materials that speed up reactions, with thin films of silica can impact the energies and rates of these reactions. The thin silica forms a two-dimensional (2-D) array of hexagonal-prism-shaped cages containing silicon and oxygen atoms.
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IMAGE: Nanoparticle of gold [Au] above metal mirror, showing molecular vibration for organic molecule BPT view more
Credit: André Garcia Primo, UNICAMP)
Optomechanical microcavities are extremely small structures with diameters of less than 10 micrometers (about a tenth of a human hair) inside which light and mechanical vibrations are confined. Thanks to their small size and to efficient microfabrication techniques that enable them to hold intense light energy and interact with mechanical waves, microcavities can be used as mass and acceleration sensors and in Raman scattering (a spectroscopy technique deployed to analyze materials, including gases, liquids, and solids). A sound understanding of these phenomena can contribute in future to advances in areas such as biomedicine, including the development of sensors to detect molecules that serve as cancer markers, for example.
Credit: TPU researchers Raul David Rodriguez Contreras and Evgeniya Sheremet
TPU researchers jointly with their colleagues from foreign universities have developed a method that allows for a laser-driven integration of metals into polymers to form electrically conductive composites. The research findings are presented in Ultra-Robust Flexible Electronics by Laser-Driven Polymer-Nanomaterials Integration article Ultra-Robust Flexible Electronics by Laser-Driven Polymer-Nanomaterials Integration, published in
Advanced Functional Materials academic journal (Q1, IF 16,836). Currently developing breakthrough technologies such as the Internet of Things, flexible electronics, brain-computer interfaces will have a great impact on society in the next few years. The development of these technologies requires crucially new materials that exhibit superior mechanical, chemical and electric stability, comparatively low cost to produce on a large scale, as well as biocompatibility for certain