Osta, Oriana; Bombled, Marianne; Partouche, David; Gallier, Florian; Lubin-Germain, Nadège; Brodie-Linder, Nancy; Alba-Simionesco, Christiane
Tailoring the Hydrophobicity of Mesoporous Organosilica for Protein Trapping and Supported Catalysis
We propose a method to enhance lysozyme trapping and supported-Copper catalysis when confined in organosilica materials. The direct synthesis presented here allows the control of the silica surface hydrophobicity by uniform introduction of methyl or phenyl groups. As a result, the lysozyme trapping is observed to be 3.2 times more…
Unlocking Simultaneously the Temperature and Electrochemical Windows of Aqueous Phthalocyanine Electrolytes
Huang, Zhifeng; Zhang, Peng; Gao, Xinpei; Henkensmeier, Dirk; Passerini, Stefano; Chen, Ruiyong
The change from organic solvents to aqueous solvents for safe and robust battery electrolytes is desirable for electrochemical energy storage. Thermodynamically, water has an electrochemical stability window of 1.23 V, and pure water freezes at 0 °C. Such properties clearly restrict the high-voltage applications and temperature adaptability of aqueous electrolytes.…
Hard–Soft Carbon Composite Anodes with Synergistic Sodium Storage Performance
Xie, Fei; Xu, Zhen; Jensen, Anders C. S.; Au, Heather; Lu, Yaxiang; Araullo‐Peters, Vicente; Drew, Alan J.; Hu, Yong-Sheng; Titirici, Maria-Magdalena
A series of hard–soft carbon composite materials is produced from biomass and oil waste and applied as low-cost anodes for sodium-ion batteries to study the fundamentals behind the dependence of Na storage on their structural features. A good reversible capacity of 282 mAh g−1 is obtained at a current density…
Highly compressive and stretchable poly(ethylene glycol) based hydrogels synthesised using pH-responsive nanogels without free-radical chemistry
Nguyen, Nam T.; Milani, Amir H.; Jennings, James; Adlam, Daman J.; Freemont, Anthony J.; Hoyland, Judith A.; Saunders, Brian R.
Poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG) based hydrogels are amongst the most studied synthetic hydrogels. However, reports on PEG-based hydrogels with high mechanical strength are limited. Herein, a class of novel, well-defined PEG-based nanocomposite hydrogels with tunable mechanical strength are synthesised via ring-opening reactions of diglycidyl ethers with carboxylate ions. The pH responsive…
Multiscale Self-Assembly of a Phenyl-Flanked Diketopyrrolopyrrole Derivative: A Solution-Processable Building Block for π-Conjugated Supramolecular Polymers
Wang, Kai; Bohra, Hassan; Gonçalves, Rui A.; Bhatnagar, Harshangda; Wu, Yingjie; Wang, Xiaochen; Wang, Zheng; Wei, Xin; Lam, Yeng Ming; Wang, Mingfeng
We report a solution-processable π-conjugated molecular building block (denoted as PhDPP) consisting of a rigid and planar core of phenyl-flanked diketopyrrolopyrrole and “soft” branched alkoxy chains that endow the solubility in a variety of organic solvents. Intermolecular hydrogen bonding in PhDPP was revealed in nonpolar solvents above a threshold of…
Electrospun PCL-protein scaffolds coated by pyrrole plasma polymerization
Cruz, Yeyzon; Muñoz, Efrén; Gomez-Pachón, E. Y.; Morales-Corona, Juan; Olayo-Lortia, Jesús; Olayo, Roberto; Olayo-Valles, Roberto
Polymeric scaffolds prepared from polycaprolactone (PCL), PCL-collagen and PCL-elastin were prepared by electrospinning. The scaffolds were coated by plasma polymerization of pyrrole doped with iodine, to improve cellular adhesion and fibroblast proliferation. The morphology, composition, and crystalline structure of the scaffolds were characterized by scanning electron microscopy (SEM),…
Self-Assembly Investigations of Sulfonated Poly(methyl methacrylate- block -styrene) Diblock Copolymer Thin Films
Piñón-Balderrama, Claudia; Leyva-Porras, César; Olayo-Valles, Roberto; Revilla-Vázquez, Javier; Schubert, Ulrich S.; Guerrero-Sanchez, Carlos; Bonilla-Cruz, José
Poly(methyl methacrylate- block -styrene) block copolymers (BCs) of low dispersity were selectively sulfonated on the styrenic segment. Several combinations of degree of polymerization and volume fraction of each block were investigated to access different self-assembled morphologies. Thin films of the sulfonated block copolymers were prepared by spin-coating and…
Directed Assembly of Hierarchical Supramolecular Block Copolymers: A Strategy To Create Donor–Acceptor Charge-Transfer Stacks
Deepthi, Krishnan; Amal, Raj R. B.; Rajeev, V. R.; Unni, K. N. Narayanan; Gowd, E. Bhoje
Macromolecules, 2019, vol 52, 7, pp. 2889-2899DOI:10.1021/acs.macromol.8b02448Visit the full articleBack to the overview
Using the singular value decomposition to extract 2D correlation functions from scattering patterns
Bender, Philipp; Zákutná, Dominika; Disch, Sabrina; Marcano, Lourdes; Venero, Diego Alba; Honecker, Dirk
We apply the truncated singular value decomposition (SVD) to extract the underlying 2D correlation functions from small-angle scattering patterns. We test the approach by transforming the simulated data of ellipsoidal particles and show that also in case of anisotropic patterns (i.e. aligned ellipsoids) the derived correlation functions correspond to the…
Scalable preparation of alternating block copolymer particles with inverse bicontinuous mesophases
Lv, Fei; An, Zesheng; Wu, Peiyi
Block copolymer particles with controlled morphologies play a vital role in materials science and nanotechnology. Here the authors show a scalable preparation of amphiphilic alternating block polymer particles with inverse bicontinuous mesophases via polymerization-induced…