Utilization of optical polarization microscopy in the study of sorption characteristics of wound dressing host materials.

Polarization microscopy was used for evaluation of kinetics of diclofenac sorption in three different wound dressing materials. The sorption kinetics can be evaluated by radii change and intensity of the light traveling through the fiber. The most frequently used host materials for drugs in wound dressings are alginate, polyesters such as polyethylene terephthalate, and viscose.

The study of plasma's modification effects in viscose used as an absorbent for wound-relevant fluids.

Extreme non-equilibrium oxygen plasma was used for the deep functionalisation of viscose materials used for the healing of chronic wounds. Those thermal effects, which usually appear during plasma treatment due to the influence of charged particles, were avoided effectively by using electrode-less discharge at a very low power density of 25 W/l volume. A huge flux of neutrally reactive atoms at room temperature of 3x10(23)m(-2)s(-1), allowed for the effective diffusion of O-atoms into inter-fibril space and thus the activation of fibrils throughout the non-woven materials.

Liponucleoside thin films: the special behaviour of guanosine.

We performed a comparative study of self-assembling properties of liponucleoside materials containing different nucleobases in their hydrophilic headgroups, but possessing the same type of lipophilic moiety in their hydrophobic tails. Surface pressure versus area isotherms (π(A)) of monolayers formed at the air-water interface show that guanine-based materials form stable monolayer films exhibiting a profound first order phase transition from the liquid expanded to the condensed phase. Materials based on other nucleobases form less stable films exhibiting a liquid-like behaviour.

Micropatterning of light-sensitive liquid-crystal elastomers.

We demonstrate that photoisomerizable liquid-crystal elastomer soft films can be used as tunable holographic gratings. Optomechanical mechanism of imprinting one-dimensional grating structure into the soft matrix by two-beam uv laser interference can be clearly resolved from the time dependence of the reading beam diffraction patterns. We analyze the observed response in terms of cis-trans isomerization-controlled modulation of the grating profile.