Many common elastomeric products, including nitrile gloves, are manufactured by coagulant dipping. This process involves the destabilization and gelation of a latex dispersion by an ionic coagulant. Despite widespread application, the physical chemistry governing coagulant dipping is poorly understood.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDuring the COVID-19 pandemic, many millions have worn masks made of woven fabric to reduce the risk of transmission of COVID-19. Masks are essentially air filters worn on the face that should filter out as many of the dangerous particles as possible. Here, the dangerous particles are the droplets containing the virus that are exhaled by an infected person.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA systematic study on the sonocrystallisation of ZIF-8 (zeolitic imidazolate framework-8) in a water-based system was investigated under different mixing speeds, ultrasound frequencies, calorimetric powers and sonication time. Regardless of the synthesis technique, pure crystals of ZIF-8 with high BET (Brunauer, Emmett and Teller) specific surface area (SSA) can be obtained in water after only 5 s. Furthermore, 5 s sonication produced even smaller crystals (~0.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn the COVID-19 pandemic, among the more controversial issues is the use of masks and face coverings. Much of the concern boils down to the question-just how effective are face coverings? One means to address this question is to review our understanding of the physical mechanisms by which masks and coverings operate-steric interception, inertial impaction, diffusion, and electrostatic capture. We enquire as to what extent these can be used to predict the efficacy of coverings.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProc Natl Acad Sci U S A
October 2020
Glucose is an important energy source in our bodies, and its consumption results in gradients over length scales ranging from the subcellular to entire organs. Concentration gradients can drive material transport through both diffusioosmosis and convection. Convection arises because concentration gradients are mass density gradients.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe molecular composition of polymer blend surfaces defines properties such as adhesion, wetting, gloss, and biocompatibility. The surface composition often differs from the bulk because of thermodynamic effects or modification. Mixtures of colloids and linear polymers in a common solvent are often used to deposit films for use in encapsulants, inks, coatings, and adhesives.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSonocrystallisation is the application of ultrasound to the crystallisation process. The benefits obtained by sonication have been widely studied since the beginning of the 20th century and so far it is clear that ultrasound can be a very useful tool for enhancing crystallisation and controlling the properties of the final product. Crystal size, polymorphs, purity, process repeatability and lower induction time are only some of the advantages of sonocrystallisation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe more we learn about the cytoplasm of cells, the more we realize that the cytoplasm is not uniform but instead is highly inhomogeneous. In any inhomogeneous solution, there are concentration gradients, and particles move either up or down these gradients due to a mechanism called diffusiophoresis. I estimate that inside metabolically active cells, the dynamics of particles can be strongly accelerated by diffusiophoresis, provided that they are at least tens of nanometers across.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFI model the drying of a liquid film containing small and big colloid particles. Fortini et al. [Phys.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA colloidal particle placed in an inhomogeneous solution of smaller nonadsorbing polymers will move towards regions of lower polymer concentration in order to reduce the free energy of the interface between the surface of the particle and the solution. This phenomenon is known as diffusiophoresis. Treating the polymer as penetrable hard spheres, as in the Asakura-Oosawa model, a simple analytic expression for the diffusiophoretic drift velocity can be obtained.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMost substances can crystallise into two or more different crystal lattices called polymorphs. Despite this, there are no systems in which we can quantitatively predict the probability of one competing polymorph forming instead of the other. We address this problem using large scale (hundreds of events) studies of the competing nucleation of the alpha and gamma polymorphs of glycine.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe perform particle resolved experimental studies on the heterogeneous crystallisation process of two component mixtures of hard spheres. The components have a size ratio of 0.39.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe investigate the drying process of three-component and polydisperse colloidal suspensions using Brownian dynamics simulations. We have previously reported (Phys. Rev.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFACS Appl Mater Interfaces
December 2016
Stratified coatings are used to provide properties at a surface, such as hardness or refractive index, which are different from underlying layers. Although time-savings are offered by self-assembly approaches, there have been no methods yet reported to offer stratification on demand. Here, we demonstrate a strategy to create self-assembled stratified coatings, which can be switched to homogeneous structures when required.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn simulations and experiments, we study the drying of films containing mixtures of large and small colloidal particles in water. During drying, the mixture stratifies into a layer of the larger particles at the bottom with a layer of the smaller particles on top. We developed a model to show that a gradient in osmotic pressure, which develops dynamically during drying, is responsible for the segregation mechanism behind stratification.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWhen fabricating photonic crystals from suspensions in volatile liquids using the horizontal deposition method, the conventional approach is to evaporate slowly to increase the time for particles to settle in an ordered, periodic close-packed structure. Here, we show that the greatest ordering of 10 nm aqueous gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) in a template of larger spherical polymer particles (mean diameter of 338 nm) is achieved with very fast water evaporation rates obtained with near-infrared radiative heating. Fabrication of arrays over areas of a few cm(2) takes only 7 min.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDystrophin forms an essential link between sarcolemma and cytoskeleton, perturbation of which causes muscular dystrophy. We analysed Dystrophin binding dynamics in vivo for the first time. Within maturing fibres of host zebrafish embryos, our analysis reveals a pool of diffusible Dystrophin and complexes bound at the fibre membrane.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe cell contains highly dynamic structures exploiting physical principles of self-organisation at the mesoscale (100 nm to 10 μm). Examples include non-membrane bound cytoplasmic bodies, cytoskeleton-based motor networks and multi-scale chromatin organisation. The challenges of mesoscale self-organisation were discussed at a CECAM workshop in July 2014.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPhys Rev E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys
February 2014
Nucleation of a new phase almost always starts at a surface. This surface is almost always assumed not to change with time. However, surfaces can roughen, partially dissolve, and change chemically with time.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHere, we explore the use of two- and three-dimensional scaffolds of multiwalled-carbon nanotubes (MWNTs) for hepatocyte cell culture. Our objective is to study the use of these scaffolds in liver tissue engineering and drug discovery. In our experiments, primary rat hepatocytes, the parenchymal (main functional) cell type in the liver, were cultured on aligned nanogrooved MWNT sheets, MWNT yarns, or standard 2-dimensional culture conditions as a control.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHere we show an industrially scalable and inexpensive method of fabricating entirely synthetic, non-xenogeneic carbon nanotube-based scaffolds by vacuum filtration for the culture of human embryonic stem cells. We show that controlled exposure of carbon nanotubes to sonication and the amount of energy delivered to the dispersion directly impacts the surface properties, allowing for control over the nanotopography of the resulting carbon nanotube films, which in turn has demonstrable effects upon in vitro human embryonic stem cells cultures. By altering the nanotube processing conditions before film fabrication, it is possible to influence cell adherence, proliferation and colony morphology.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe study the nucleation of a new thermodynamic phase in the presence of quenched disorder. The quenched disorder is a generic model of both impurities and disordered porous media; both are known to have large effects on nucleation. We find that the nucleation rate is non-self-averaging.
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