With increasing toxicity and environmental concerns, electrospinning from water, i.e., waterborne electrospinning, is crucial to further exploit the resulting nanofiber potential. Most water-soluble polymers have the inherent limitation of resulting in water-soluble nanofibers, and a tedious chemical cross-linking step is required to reach stable n...
Published in ACS applied materials & interfaces
The micromanipulation of biological samples is important for microbiology, pharmaceutical science, and related bioengineering fields. In this work, we report the fabrication and characterization of surface-attached microbeam arrays of 20 μm width and 25 μm height made of poly(N-isopropylacrylamide), a thermoresponsive polymer, with embedded spheric...
Published in ACS applied materials & interfaces
Thermotropic glazing is one of the most promising developments for adaptive solar control; however, a monotonic transparent-opaque transition limits its practical application. In this work, to render stepwise activation of the switchable glazing, we prepared multicomposition copolymers having a compositional gradient. By slow addition of the monome...
Published in Advanced materials (Deerfield Beach, Fla.)
Fully reversible emission color change is achieved by blending a thermoresponsive polymer with dye hybrids. The emission color can be tuned by changing the mixing ratio of each polymer-dye hybrid. © 2016 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.
Published in Science China Chemistry
In this work, 16 kinds of [FeCl4]--based magnetic ionic liquids (ILs) with different cation structures have been designed and synthesized, and their structures are characterized by IR and Raman spectroscopy. Then the lower critical solution temperature (LCST)-type phase behavior of these magnetic ILs in water is investigated as a function of concen...
Published in ACS applied materials & interfaces
Several thermoresponsive block copolymers constituted of a poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG) and a poly(2-(2-methoxyethoxy) ethyl methacrylate) (PMEO2MA) block were prepared by atom transfer radical polymerization (ATRP) and their ability to extract oil from oil sands was evaluated. The chemical composition of the PEG113-b-PMEO2MAX block copolymers was d...
Published in Chemistry (Weinheim an der Bergstrasse, Germany)
Easily reversible aqueous dispersion/precipitation of multiwalled carbon nanotubes (MWNTs) has been demonstrated using small-molecule non-ionic pyrene-based surfactants, which exhibit lower critical solution temperature (LCST) phase behaviour. The MWNTs are dispersed by means of non-covalent interactions. The dispersibility can be switched "off" (i...
Published in Chemphyschem : a European journal of chemical physics and physical chemistry
The effect of solute affinity on solute diffusion in binary liquids well below the lower critical solution temperature (LCST) was studied by using fluorescence correlation spectroscopy. We measured the hydrodynamic radii of a hydrophobic and an amphiphilic fluorescent dye under systematic variation of the relative molar fractions of water/2-butoxye...
Published in ACS applied materials & interfaces
Iron oxide nanoparticles dispersed within a thermally responsive poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) (PNIPAm) hydrogel matrix effectively convert the photo energy of visible light of modest intensity into thermal energy, providing the efficient means to trigger changes in volumetric swelling of hydrogels. However, long irradiation time (on the order of min...
Published in Journal of Colloid And Interface Science
To explore the role of additives in controlling the critical micellization temperature (CMT) of a block copolymer in aqueous solution, in the present work, a series of ionic liquids (ILs) containing the same cation, 1-butyl-3-methylimidazolium, bmim+ and commonly used anions such as SCN−, BF4-, I−, Cl−, CH3COO− and HSO4- were chosen for study with ...
