Tsurko, Evgeny S.; Feicht, Patrick; Nehm, Frederik; Ament, Kevin; Rosenfeldt, Sabine; Pietsch, Ines; Roschmann, Konrad; Kalo, Hussein; Breu, Josef
Large Scale Self-Assembly of Smectic Nanocomposite Films by Doctor Blading versus Spray Coating: Impact of Crystal Quality on Barrier Properties
Flexible transparent barrier films are required in various fields of application ranging from flexible, transparent food packaging to display encapsulation. Environmentally friendly, waterborne polymer–clay nanocomposites would be preferred but fail to meet in particular requirements for ultra high water vapor barriers. Here we show that self-assembly of nanocomposite films into…
Reactive oligo (dimethylsiloxane) mesogens and their nanostructured thin films
Nickmans, K.; Leclere, Ph; Lub, J.; Broer, D. J.; Schenning, APHJ
Soft matter, 2017, vol 13, 24, pp. 4357–4362DOI:Back to the overview
Structural analysis of Ioncell-F fibres from birch wood
Asaadi, Shirin; Hummel, Michael; Ahvenainen, Patrik; Gubitosi, Marta; Olsson, Ulf; Sixta, Herbert
Quite recently, the Ioncell-F process, a novel and promising Lyocell fibre process, has been developed. The ionic liquid 1,5-diazabicyclonon-5-enium acetate (OAc) utilized in this process, was identified as an excellent cellulose solvent for dry-jet wet fibre spinning. Fibres spun from cellulose-OAc solution have shown excellent mechanical properties. Herein, various structural…
Dynamic glass transition of the rigid amorphous fraction in polyurethane-urea/SiO2 nanocomposites
Koutsoumpis, Stefanos; Raftopoulos, Konstantinos N.; Oguz, Oguzhan; Papadakis, Christine M.; Menceloglu, Yusuf Z.; Pissis, Polycarpos
We report molecular dynamics in the rigid amorphous fraction (RAF) of the polymer bound at the interfaces with nanoparticles in polymer nanocomposites and calculate the glass transition temperature, Tg, for this bound layer of polymer. We follow the ‘3-phase-model’ for semicrystalline polymers where the polymer matrix consists of the crystalline…
Non-lamellar lipid assembly at interfaces: controlling layer structure by responsive nanogel particles
Dabkowska, Aleksandra P.; Valldeperas, Maria; Hirst, Christopher; Montis, Costanza; Pálsson, Gunnar K.; Wang, Meina; Nöjd, Sofi; Gentile, Luigi; Barauskas, Justas; Steinke, Nina-Juliane; Schroeder-Turk, Gerd E.; George, Sebastian; Skoda, Maximilian W. A.; Nylander, Tommy
Biological membranes do not only occur as planar bilayer structures, but depending on the lipid composition, can also curve into intriguing three-dimensional structures. In order to fully understand the biological implications as well as to reveal the full potential for applications, e.g. for drug delivery and other biomedical devices, of…
Deformation X-ray study of propylene-based elastomers with controlled sequence distributions
Lu, Yonglai; Norman, Alexander I.; Tsou, Andy H.; Hagadorn, John R.; Hsiao, Benjamin S.
Three iso-specific organometallic catalysts for ethylene and propylene copolymerization with varying products of ethylene and propylene reactivity ratios were utilized to synthesize equal-molecular-weight propylene-based elastomers (PBEs) of alternating (aPBE), random (rPBE), and blocky (bPBE) backbone sequences. To compensate for the variations in catalyst iso-specificity, the ethylene content…
Fluorescence Polarization Measurements to Probe Alignment of a Bithiophene Dye in One-Dimensional Channels of Self-Assembled Phenylethynylene Bis-Urea Macrocycle Crystals
Kittikhunnatham, Preecha; Som, Bozumeh; Rassolov, Vitaly; Stolte, Matthias; Würthner, Frank; Shimizu, Linda S.; Greytak, Andrew B.
This paper describes the use of polarized fluorescence microscopy to directly probe guest molecule orientation in bis-urea macrocycle crystals. These macrocycles assemble to afford one-dimensional (1D) microchannels ∼9 Å in diameter that have previously been shown to exhibit normal Fickian diffusion and induce selective reactivity among the confined guest molecules.…
A versatile approach to different colored photonic films generated from block copolymers and their conversion into polymer-grafted nanoplatelets
Huang, Yucheng; Zheng, Yang; Pribyl, Julia; Benicewicz, Brian C.
One-dimensional photonic crystals can be formed by the self-assembly of block copolymers. However, such materials are still difficult to make due to the synthetic challenge of making high molecular weight block copolymers and the slow self-assembly characteristics of these block copolymers to form high domain spacings (d > 150 nm).…
Effects of Cations on the Behaviour of Lipid Cubic Phases
Brasnett, Christopher; Longstaff, Georgia; Compton, Laura; Seddon, Annela
Inverse bicontinuous cubic structures formed by lipids have been demonstrated in a wide variety of applications, from a host matrix for proteins for crystallisation, to templates for nanoscale structures. Recent work has focused on tuning their properties to realize such applications, often by manipulating the structure by introducing other lipids…
Porous Stimuli-Responsive Self-Folding Electrospun Mats for 4D Biofabrication
Apsite, Indra; Stoychev, Georgi; Zhang, Weizhong; Jehnichen, Dieter; Xie, Jin; Ionov, Leonid
We report fabrication and characterization of electrospun, porous multi-layer scaffolds based-on thermo-responsive polymers polycaprolactone (PCL) and poly(N-isopropylacrylamide). We found that the electrospun mats fold into various 3D structures in an aqueous environment at different temperatures. We could determine the mechanism behind different folding behaviors under different conditions by…