Use of irradiated PET plastic waste for partially replacing cement in concrete?

Portland cement used in the manufacture of concrete is responsible for an estimated 5-8% of the global CO emissions. Recently published work (Schaefer et al., 2018) claims that γ-irradiated PET waste powder can be used as a partial replacement of cement in concrete for reducing its CO footprint.

A bioinspired approach to fabricate fluorescent nanotubes with strong water adhesion by soft template electropolymerization and post-grafting.

Hypothesis: In this original work, we aim to control both the surface wetting and fluorescence properties of extremely ordered and porous conducting polymer nanotubes prepared by soft template electropolymerization and post-grafting. For reaching this aim, various substituents of different hydrophobicity and fluorescence were post-grafted and the post-grafting yields were evaluated by surface analyses. We show that the used polymer is already fluorescent before post-grafting while the post-grafting yield and as a consequence the surface hydrophobicity highly depend on the substituent.

General and adaptive synthesis protocol for high-quality organosilane self-assembled monolayers as tunable surface chemistry platforms for biochemical applications.

The controlled modification of surface properties represents a pervasive requirement to be fulfilled when developing new technologies. In this paper, we propose an easy-to-implement protocol for the functionalization of glass with self-assembled monolayers (SAMs). The adaptivity of the synthesis route was demonstrated by the controlled anchoring of thiol, amino, glycidyloxy, and methacrylate groups onto the glass surface.

Anti-biofouling activity of Ranaspumin-2 bio-surfactant immobilized on catechol-functional PMMA thin layers prepared by atmospheric plasma deposition.

The deposition of polymeric thin layers bearing reactive functional groups is a promising solution to provide functionality on otherwise inert surfaces, for instance, for bioconjugation purposes. Atmospheric pressure plasma (AP plasma) deposition technology offers many advantages, such as fast deposition rates, low costs, low waste generation and suitability for coating various kind of material surfaces. In this work, the AP plasma-assisted copolymerization of methyl methacrylate (MMA) with a vinyl derivative of L-DOPA was studied in order to deposit coatings with reactive catechol/quinone groups suitable for protein covalent immobilization.