The porous gas diffusion layers (GDLs) are key components in hydrogen fuel cells. During their operation the cells produce water at the cathode, and to avoid flooding, the water has to be removed out of the cells. How to manage the water is therefore an important issue in fuel cell design. In this paper we investigated water flow in the GDLs using a combination of the lattice Boltzmann method a...

Poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) (PNIPA)-based sorbents have been successfully used as sorbents in temperature-sensitive chromatography. Yet, the mechanisms controlling the binding of biochemicals to these sorbents and, therefore, the separation process are not fully understood. In the current work, the role of hydrophobic interactions in the binding of amino acids of different hydrophobicities to P...

BACKGROUND Lignin typically inhibits enzymatic hydrolysis of cellulosic biomass, but certain organosolv lignins or lignosulfonates enhance enzymatic hydrolysis. The hydrophobic and electrostatic interactions between lignin and cellulases play critical roles in the enzymatic hydrolysis process. However, how to incorporate these two interactions into the consideration of lignin effects has not be...

The dense, heterogeneous cellular environment is known to affect protein stability through interactions with other biomacromolecules. The effect of excluded volume due to these biomolecules, also known as crowding agents, on a protein of interest, or test protein, has long been known to increase the stability of a test protein. Recently, it has been recognized that attractive protein-crowder in...

zinc oxide nano-particles with the average diameter of about 25 nm were modified with different mole ratios of trimetoxyvinyl silane (tmvs) and oleic acid, as coupling agents, in order to modify their surface properties and render them more hydrophobic. then, dispersibility of the surface modified nano-particles was examined in some monomers with different levels of hydrophobicity, including me...

The analogue of the hydrophobic hydration is explored for Lennard-Jones solutions. The free energy of solvation and its temperature derivatives, both in the constant-pressure process and in the constant-volume process, are obtained numerically for a variety of the size and energy parameters for the solute-solvent Lennard-Jones potential. We identify in the parameter space a region in which the ...

We report here the genome sequences of four Lactobacillus plantarum strains which vary in surface hydrophobicity. Bioinformatic analysis, using additional genomes of Lactobacillus plantarum strains, revealed a possible correlation between the cell wall teichoic acid-type and cell surface hydrophobicity and provide the basis for consecutive analyses.