Exhaled breath contains trace levels of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that can reveal information about metabolic processes or pathogens in the body. These molecules can be used for medical diagnosis, but capturing and accurately measuring them is a significant challenge in chemical separations. A highly selective nanoporous sorbent can be used to capture target molecules from a breath sample and preconcentrate them for use in a detector.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFVolatile organic compounds (VOCs) are harmful chemicals that are found in minute quantities in the atmosphere and are emitted from a variety of industrial and biological processes. They can be harmful to breathe or serve as biomarkers for disease detection. Therefore, capture and detection of VOCs is important.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMolybdenum disulfide (MoS) is a 2D material widely used as a dry lubricant. However, exposure to water and oxygen is known to reduce its effectiveness, and therefore an understanding of the uptake of water is important information for mitigating these effects. Here we use grand canonical Monte Carlo simulations to rigorously study water adsorption on MoS surfaces and edges with different concentrations of defects under realistic atmospheric conditions ( various temperatures and humidity levels).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMolybdenum disulfide (MoS) is a lamellar solid lubricant often used in aerospace applications because of its extremely low friction coefficient (∼0.01) in inert environments. The lubrication performance of MoS is significantly impaired by exposure to even small amounts of water and oxygen, and the mechanisms behind this remain poorly understood.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDNA G-quadruplex structures were recently discovered to provide reliable scaffolding for two-dimensional organic frameworks due to the strong hydrogen-bonding ability of guanine. Herein, 2,7-diaryl pyrene building blocks with high HOMO energies and large optical gaps are incorporated into G-quadruplex organic frameworks. The adjustable substitution on the aryl groups provides an opportunity to elucidate the framework formation mechanism; molecular non-planarity is found to be beneficial for restricting interlayer slippage, and the framework crystallinity is highest when intermolecular interaction and non-planarity strike a fine balance.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFOwing to the vast diversity of linkers, nodes, and topologies, metal-organic frameworks can be tailored for specific tasks, such as chemical separations or catalysis. Accordingly, these materials have attracted significant interest for capture and/or detoxification of toxic industrial chemicals and chemical warfare agents. In this paper, we review recent experimental and computational work pertaining to the capture of several industrially-relevant toxic chemicals, including NH, SO, NO, HS, and some volatile organic compounds, with particular emphasis on the challenging issue of designing materials that selectively adsorb these chemicals in the presence of water.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe examine the vibrational properties and Raman spectra of Si-Ge core-shell nanostructures using real-space pseudopotentials constructed within density functional theory. Our method uses no empirical parameters, unlike many popular methods for predicting Raman spectra for nanocrystals. We find the dominant features of the Raman spectrum for the Si-Ge core-shell structure to be a superposition of the Raman spectra of the Ge and Si nanocrystals with optical peaks around 300 and 500 cm(-1), respectively.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPhys Chem Chem Phys
December 2015
Real space pseudopotentials have a number of advantages in solving for the electronic structure of materials. These advantages include ease of implementation, implementation on highly parallel systems, and great flexibility for describing partially periodic systems. One limitation of this approach, shared by other electronic structure methods, is the slow convergence of interatomic forces when compared to total energies.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe development of more predictive and biologically relevant in vitro assays is predicated on the advancement of versatile cell culture systems which facilitate the functional assessment of the seeded cells. To that end, microscale cantilever technology offers a platform with which to measure the contractile functionality of a range of cell types, including skeletal, cardiac, and smooth muscle cells, through assessment of contraction induced substrate bending. Application of multiplexed cantilever arrays provides the means to develop moderate to high-throughput protocols for assessing drug efficacy and toxicity, disease phenotype and progression, as well as neuromuscular and other cell-cell interactions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFZinc oxide is often used as a popular inexpensive transparent conducting oxide. Here, we employ density functional theory and local density approximation to examine the effects of quantum confinement in doped nanocrystals of this material. Specifically, we examine the addition of Ga and Al dopants to ZnO nanocrystals on the order of 1.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInverse gas chromatography (IGC) has been used to determine the physicochemical parameters that characterize solution thermodynamic interactions in biodiesel-n-alcohol solute systems. Such data is of value to chemical engineers and separation scientists in optimizing separation processes to separate alcoholic solutes at low concentrations in soybean oil methyl ester mixtures (biodiesel). The derived activity and Henry's Law coefficient data can be used to rationalize the interaction of four members of an n-alcoholic homologous series and the soya-based methyl ester solvent in terms of such esters as "green" renewable solvents.
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