Preparation and Thermal Properties of Propyl Palmitate-Based Phase Change Composites with Enhanced Thermal Conductivity for Thermal Energy Storage.

Phase change materials (PCMs), which can absorb and release large amounts of latent heat during phase change, have been extensively studied for heat storage and thermal management. However, technical bottlenecks regarding low thermal conductivity and leakage have hindered practical applications of PCMs. In this paper, a simple, economical, and scalable absorption polymerization technique is proposed to prepare the polymethyl methacrylate/propyl palmitate/expanded graphite (MPCM/EG) phase change composites by constructing the microencapsulated phase change materials (polymethyl methacrylate/propyl palmitate, MPCM) with core-shell structures in the three-dimensional (3D) EG networks, taking propyl palmitate as the PCM core, polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) as the shell, and long-chain "worm-like" EG as the thermally conductive networks.

In situ growth of hierarchical AlO nanostructures onto TiO nanofibers surface: super-hydrophilicity, efficient oil/water separation and dye-removal.

Developing a facile strategy to synthesize template-free TiO membrane with stable super-hydrophilic surface is still a daunting challenge. In this work, super-hydrophilicity (close to 0°) and underwater super-oleophobicity (165°) have been successfully demonstrated on a hierarchical AlO/TiO membrane, which is prepared via a facile electrospinning method followed by simple calcination in air. The precisely-tuned AlO heterojunctions grew in situ and dispersed uniformly on the TiO surface, resulting in an 'island in the sea' configuration.

Finding All Longest Common Segments in Protein Structures Efficiently.

The Local/Global Alignment (Zemla, 2003), or LGA, is a popular method for the comparison of protein structures. One of the two components of LGA requires us to compute the longest common contiguous segments between two protein structures. That is, given two structures A = (a1, .