Publications by authors named "Peter A Beaucage"

Article Synopsis
  • Art and materials innovation have been linked throughout history, but modern materials science can make it harder for artists to access advanced materials.
  • Artist Kimsooja collaborated with the Wiesner Lab at Cornell University to create a unique iridescent coating for her large art installation, "A Needle Woman: Galaxy Is a Memory, Earth is a Souvenir."
  • The project not only included detailed material characterization but also aimed to inspire collaboration among materials science, the arts, and architecture, showcasing the potential of innovative materials.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • * Adding 15 mol % of a difunctional chain extender reduces the cross-link density by half, increasing the free amine content by 80%, which leads to greater swelling and a 30% increase in salt passage but surprisingly a 30% decrease in water permeance.
  • * The observed decrease in water permeance is explained by slower water diffusion in the less cross-linked network, indicating stronger interactions between water and the increased free amine groups, demonstrating complex behavior in water mobility at different scales.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • - Polarized resonant soft X-ray scattering (P-RSoXS) is a cutting-edge technique that helps analyze the molecular orientation and chemical makeup of soft materials like polymers and biomaterials through X-ray scattering and spectroscopy.
  • - A new open-source virtual instrument has been developed to simulate P-RSoXS patterns using powerful GPUs, significantly speeding up the process and handling complex sample properties at nanoscale levels.
  • - This new framework dramatically enhances simulation speed (over 1000 times faster than existing software) and simplifies user interaction by integrating with Python, making it easier for researchers to explore, analyze, and apply the data in various scientific applications.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • - The text discusses advancements in synthesizing superconducting quantum metamaterials, which are important for their novel properties, but have historically been difficult to produce due to material quality issues.
  • - Researchers have discovered new methods using block copolymer self-assembly to create niobium nitrides and carbonitrides that maintain structural integrity at high temperatures (up to 1000 °C) and have critical temperature values similar to their bulk counterparts.
  • - The study shows that various mesostructured superconductors can be synthesized from a single triblock terpolymer, highlighting a connection between soft matter self-assembly and hard condensed matter, with unusual magnetic behavior observed in a specific structure.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Porous materials design often faces a trade-off between the requirements of high internal surface area and high reagent flux. Inorganic materials with asymmetric/hierarchical pore structures or well-defined mesopores have been tested to overcome this trade-off, but success has remained limited when the strategies are employed individually. Here, the attributes of both strategies are combined and a scalable path to porous titanium nitride (TiN) and carbon membranes that are conducting (TiN, carbon) or superconducting (TiN) is demonstrated.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Properties arising from ordered periodic mesostructures are often obscured by small, randomly oriented domains and grain boundaries. Bulk macroscopic single crystals with mesoscale periodicity are needed to establish fundamental structure-property correlations for materials ordered at this length scale (10-100 nm). A solvent-evaporation-induced crystallization method providing access to large (millimeter to centimeter) single-crystal mesostructures, specifically bicontinuous gyroids, in thick films (>100 µm) derived from block copolymers is reported.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) was performed on dispersions of ultrasmall (d < 10 nm) fluorescent organic-inorganic hybrid core-shell silica nanoparticles synthesized in aqueous solutions (C' dots) by using an oscillating flow cell to overcome beam induced particle degradation. Form factor analysis and fitting was used to determine the size and size dispersity of the internal silica core containing covalently encapsulated fluorophores. The structure of the organic poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG) shell was modelled as a monodisperse corona containing concentrated and semi-dilute regimes of decaying density and as a simple polydisperse shell to determine the bounds of dispersity in the overall hybrid particle.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

We have prepared the first crystalline and 3D periodically ordered mesoporous quaternary semiconductor photocatalyst in an evaporation-induced self-assembly assisted soft-templating process. Using lab synthesized triblock-terpolymer poly(isoprene-b-styrene-b-ethylene oxide) (ISO) a highly ordered 3D interconnected alternating gyroid morphology was achieved exhibiting near and long-range order, as evidenced by small angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) and electron microscopy (TEM/SEM). Moreover, we reveal the formation process on the phase-pure construction of the material's pore-walls with its high crystallinity, which proceeds along a highly stable W compound, by both in situ and ex situ analyses, including X-ray powder diffraction (XRPD), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) and electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Three-dimensional (3D) mesoporous thin films with sub-100 nm periodic lattices are of increasing interest as templates for a number of nanotechnology applications, yet are hard to achieve with conventional top-down fabrication methods. Block copolymer self-assembly derived mesoscale structures provide a toolbox for such 3D template formation. In this work, single (alternating) gyroidal and double gyroidal mesoporous thin-film structures are achieved via solvent vapor annealing assisted co-assembly of poly(isoprene-block-styrene-block-ethylene oxide) (PI-b-PS-b-PEO, ISO) and resorcinol/phenol formaldehyde resols.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The stability of carbon-based catalyst supports represents one of the biggest challenges for the commercialisation of proton-exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs). Metal nitrides are an attractive alternative to carbon-based supports, owing to their high bulk conductivity and acid stability. We report the electrochemical stability evaluation of high-surface-area metal nitrides in acidic electrolytes.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Covalent organic frameworks (COFs) are two- or three-dimensional (2D or 3D) polymer networks with designed topology and chemical functionality, permanent porosity, and high surface areas. These features are potentially useful for a broad range of applications, including catalysis, optoelectronics, and energy storage devices. But current COF syntheses offer poor control over the material's morphology and final form, generally providing insoluble and unprocessable microcrystalline powder aggregates.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Superconductors with periodically ordered mesoporous structures are expected to have properties very different from those of their bulk counterparts. Systematic studies of such phenomena to date are sparse, however, because of a lack of versatile synthetic approaches to such materials. We demonstrate the formation of three-dimensionally continuous gyroidal mesoporous niobium nitride (NbN) superconductors from chiral ABC triblock terpolymer self-assembly-directed sol-gel-derived niobium oxide with subsequent thermal processing in air and ammonia gas.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

A PHP Error was encountered

Severity: Notice

Message: fwrite(): Write of 34 bytes failed with errno=28 No space left on device

Filename: drivers/Session_files_driver.php

Line Number: 272

Backtrace:

A PHP Error was encountered

Severity: Warning

Message: session_write_close(): Failed to write session data using user defined save handler. (session.save_path: /var/lib/php/sessions)

Filename: Unknown

Line Number: 0

Backtrace: