Search results for "Diffusion"

1977

2021

Water-in-salt systems, i.e., super-concentrated aqueous electrolytes, such as lithium bis(trifluoromethanesulfonyl)imide (21 mol/kgwater), have been recently discovered to exhibit unexpectedly large electrochemical windows and high lithium transference numbers, thus paving the way to safe and sustainable charge storage devices. The peculiar transport features in these electrolytes are influenced by their intrinsically nanoseparated morphology, stemming from the anion hydrophobic nature and manifesting as nanosegregation between anions and water domains. The underlying mechanism behind this structure-dynamics correlation is, however, still a matter of strong debate. Here, we enhance the apol…

Mesoscopic gel at low agarose concentration in water: a dynamic light scattering study

1995

Previous work in our laboratory has shown that at very low agarose concentration in water gelation still occurs within mutually disconnected, high concentration regions generated by spinodal demixing. The freely diffusing particles obtained in these conditions are studied in the present work by depolarized dynamic light scattering and probe diffusion experiments. These particles are found to behave as large (in fact, mesoscopic) polymer fibers entangled in a continuously rearranged mesh with scaling parameters typical of partially flexible, neutral chains. The present results allow specifying the notion of mesoscopic gelation. They also reveal that the same symmetry-breaking mechanism that …

Self-Assembling of Peptide/Membrane Complexes by Atomistic Molecular Dynamics Simulations

2007

Abstract Model biological membranes consisting of peptide/lipid-bilayer complexes can nowadays be studied by classical molecular dynamics (MD) simulations at atomic detail. In most cases, the simulation starts with an assumed state of a peptide in a preformed bilayer, from which equilibrium configurations are difficult to obtain due to a relatively slow molecular diffusion. As an alternative, we propose an extension of reported work on the self-organization of unordered lipids into bilayers, consisting of including a peptide molecule in the initial random configuration to obtain a membrane-bound peptide simultaneous to the formation of the lipid bilayer. This strategy takes advantage of the…

Rigid polymer materials with hologram enhancement by molecular diffusion

2003

The principle of diffusional enhancement has been embodied in the rigid glassy polymer with phenanthrenequinone able to photochemically attach to surrounding macromolecules, thus forming a permanent grating. Owing to material stiffness, it does not suffer from shrinkage and can be made very thick; serving a basis for very stable spectrally selective elements. Replacement of commonly used acrylic glass by polycarbonate ensures further significant improvement of performance and stability of 3D holographic optical elements and memories.

Probe diffusion in homogeneous diblock copolymers

1998

Forced Rayleigh scattering was used to investigate the diffusion of a photoreactive dye molecule in two homogeneous poly(styrene-b-isoprene) (SI) diblock copolymers with overall molecular weights of approximately 2000. Although diffusion rates were intermediate to TTI transport in homopolymer polystyrene (PS) and polyisoprene (PI), system dynamics appear to be largely dictated in each case by the PI block. The size of the polymer jumping unit, on the other hand, is evaluated from a free-volume analysis of the data, and is found to be governed predominantly by the PS component of the copolymer. The mechanism for tracer diffusion in low-molecular-weight block copolymers appears analogous to t…

Scale dependent diffusion in latex films studied by photoinduced grating relaxation technique

2003

The transition from an aqueous dispersion of polyacrylate latices into a homogeneous polymer film on drying has been studied by monitoring the diffusion of hydrophobic and hydrophilic photochromic molecular probes with the help of a holographic grating relaxation (forced Rayleigh scattering) technique. Experiments with the hydrophobic probe in wet films result in an unusual spatial scale-dependence of the apparent diffusion coefficient that degenerates into a normal scale-independent diffusion coefficient as the film dries. Employment of a two-state diffusion model allows extracting the diffusion coefficients and mean displacements of the tracer in the polymer cores of the latex particles a…

Influence of polymer flexibility on nanoparticle dynamics in semidilute solutions

2018

The hierarchical structure and dynamics of polymer solutions control the transport of nanoparticles (NPs) through them. Here, we perform multi-particle collision dynamics simulations of solutions of semiflexible polymer chains with tunable persistence length lp to investigate the effect of chain stiffness on NP transport. The NPs exhibit two distinct dynamical regimes - subdiffusion on short time scales and diffusion on long time scales. The long-time NP diffusivities are compared with predictions from the Stokes-Einstein relation (SER), mode-coupling theory (MCT), and a recent polymer coupling theory (PCT). Increasing deviations from the SER as the polymer chains become more rigid (i.e. as…

Preparation of actuating fibres of oriented main-chain liquid crystalline elastomers by a wetspinning process

2011

We present a versatile method to prepare oriented fibres with a defined thickness from main-chain liquid crystalline elastomers. A microfluidic setup is utilized to inject a solution of a photocrosslinkable smectic A main-chain polymer into a co-flowing stream of silicone oil. Diffusion of the solvent into the oil yields solid polymer filaments that are crosslinked in a continuous way by UV-irradiation. The obtained fibres are highly oriented and show a reversible and significant contraction during the liquid crystal's phase transition.

Polymer-induced shape changes and capping in giant liposomes

1995

We studied the coupling of a polymeric amphiphile undergoing a transition from an expanded to a collapsed state of the hydrophilic polymer chain upon heating above 29°C with free and solid supported lipid bilayers. Lateral diffusion measurements and studies of vesicle shape-changes confirmed previous calorimetric studies, suggesting that the amphiphile remains incorporated in the giant vesicles and the supported bilayer during the transition. The two-dimensional hydrodynamic radii of the amphiphile in the expanded and collapsed state was measured by making use of the strong quadratic dependence of the diffusion coefficient on the radius of the diffusant (D ∞ r−2) due to the frictional coupl…