Combined hydrophobicity and mechanical durability through surface nanoengineering.

This paper reports combined hydrophobicity and mechanical durability through the nanoscale engineering of surfaces in the form of nanorod-polymer composites. Specifically, the hydrophobicity derives from nanoscale features of mechanically hard ZnO nanorods and the mechanical durability derives from the composite structure of a hard ZnO nanorod core and soft polymer shell. Experimental characterization correlates the morphology of the nanoengineered surfaces with the combined hydrophobicity and mechanical durability, and reveals the responsible mechanisms.

Surface tension model for surfactant solutions at the critical micelle concentration.

A model for the limiting surface tension of surfactant solutions (surface tension at and above the critical micelle concentration, cmc) was developed. This model takes advantage of the equilibrium between the surfactant molecules on the liquid/vacuum surface and in micelles in the bulk at the cmc. An approximate analytical equation for the surface tension at the cmc was obtained.

Adsorption of reactive particles on a random catalytic chain: an exact solution.

We study equilibrium properties of a catalytically activated annihilation A+A-->0 reaction taking place on a one-dimensional chain of length N (N--> infinity ) in which some segments (placed at random, with mean concentration p) possess special, catalytic properties. Annihilation reaction takes place as soon as any two A particles land onto two vacant sites at the extremities of the catalytic segment, or when any A particle lands onto a vacant site on a catalytic segment while the site at the other extremity of this segment is already occupied by another A particle. Noncatalytic segments are inert with respect to reaction and here two adsorbed A particles harmlessly coexist.

Influence of auto-organization and fluctuations on the kinetics of a monomer-monomer catalytic scheme.

We study analytically the kinetics of an elementary bimolecular reaction scheme of the Langmuir-Hinshelwood type taking place on a d-dimensional catalytic substrate. We propose a general approach that takes into account explicitly the influence of spatial correlations on the time evolution of the mean particle density. With this approach, we recover some known results concerning the time evolution of the mean particle density and establish others.