Molecular insights into methane hydrate dissociation: Role of methane nanobubble formation.

Understanding the underlying physics of natural gas hydrate dissociation is necessary for efficient CH4 extraction and in the exploration of potential additives in the chemical injection method. Silica being "sand" is already present inside the reservoir, making the silica nanoparticle a potential green additive. Here, molecular dynamics (MD) simulations have been performed to investigate the dissociation of the CH4 hydrate in the presence and absence of ∼1, ∼2, and ∼3 nm diameter hydrophilic silica nanoparticles at 100 bar and 310 K.

A novel approach to improve the oil miscibility and incorporate multifunctionality in ionic liquids as lubricant additives.

Recently ionic liquids (ILs) have shown promising tribological properties as additives in base oils; however their lack of miscibility is a problem, with very few ILs being compatible with lubricant oil formulation (non-polar base oils). This work shows the use of a surfactant which can increase the range of available ILs that are stable when added to these base oils. In this study a range of tetraalkylphosphonium based ILs were successfully blended with a PIBSA surfactant and these blends were all shown to be miscible in a non-polar base oil.

High-efficient production of boron nitride nanosheets via an optimized ball milling process for lubrication in oil.

Although tailored wet ball milling can be an efficient method to produce a large quantity of two-dimensional nanomaterials, such as boron nitride (BN) nanosheets, milling parameters including milling speed, ball-to-powder ratio, milling ball size and milling agent, are important for optimization of exfoliation efficiency and production yield. In this report, we systematically investigate the effects of different milling parameters on the production of BN nanosheets with benzyl benzoate being used as the milling agent. It is found that small balls of 0.

Anchor dependency for non-glycerol based cationic lipofectins: mixed bag of regular and anomalous transfection profiles.

Although detailed structure-activity, physicochemical and biophysical investigations in probing the anchor influence in liposomal gene delivery have been reported for glycerol-based transfection lipids, the corresponding investigation for non-glycerol based simple monocationic transfection lipids have not yet been undertaken. Towards this end, herein, we delineate our structure-activity and physicochemical approach in deciphering the anchor dependency in liposomal gene delivery using fifteen new structural analogues (lipids 1-15) of recently reported non-glycerol based monocationic transfection lipids. The C(14) analogues in both series 1 (lipids 1-6) and series 2 (lipids 7-15) showed maximum efficiency in transfecting COS-1 and CHO cells.