The lipids of biological membranes and intact biomembranes display chain melting transitions close to temperatures of physiological interest. During this transition the heat capacity, volume and area compressibilities, and relaxation times all reach maxima. Compressibilities are thus nonlinear functions of temperature and pressure in the vicinity of the melting transition, and we show that this...

Superheating is a phenomenon in which the temperature in a solid phase is higher than the melting temperature. This phenomenon is common when a microwave or an induction heating method is used during a melting process. The classical interface conditions (Stefan conditions) have to be modified in order to model this phenomenon. In this paper we study a melting process for highly conductive mater...

Early seedling emergence can increase plant fitness under competition. Seed oil composition (the types and relative amounts of fatty acids in the oils) may play an important role in determining emergence timing and early growth rate in oilseeds. Saturated fatty acids provide more energy per carbon atom than unsaturated fatty acids but have substantially higher melting points (when chain length ...

In this chapter, the analytical embedded atom method and calculating Gibbs free energy method are introduced briefly. Combining these methods with molecular dynamic and Monte Carlo techniques, thermodynamics of nano-silver and alloy particles have been studied systematically. For silver nanoparticles, calculations for melting temperature, molar heat of fusion, molar entropy of fusion, and tempe...

MOTIVATION In a wide range of experimental techniques in biology, there is a need for an efficient method to calculate the melting temperature of pairings of two single DNA strands. Avoiding cross-hybridization when choosing primers for the polymerase chain reaction or selecting probes for large-scale DNA assays are examples where the exact determination of melting temperatures is important. Be...

The melting temperature of a nanoscaled particle is known to decrease as the curvature of the solid-melt interface increases. This relationship is most often modelled by a Gibbs-Thomson law, with the decrease in melting temperature proposed to be a product of the curvature of the solid-melt interface and the surface tension. Such a law must break down for sufficiently small particles, since the...

Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, and its properties under conditions of high temperature and pressure are crucial to understand the interior of large gaseous planets and other astrophysical bodies. At ultra-high pressures solid hydrogen has been predicted to transform into a quantum fluid, because of its high zero-point motion. Here we report first-principles twophase coex...

Walter Kauzmann's classic 1948 review of liquid supercooling and glass formation drew attention to the temperatures at which (by extrapolation) enthalpies and entropies of liquid and crystal phases would appear to become equal. In the temperature-pressure (T, p) plane, the collection of such 'Kauzmann temperatures' generate characteristic curves. The present study examines the connection of tho...

Loops are essential secondary structure elements in folded DNA and RNA molecules and proliferate close to the melting transition. Using a theory for nucleic acid secondary structures that accounts for the logarithmic entropy -c ln m for a loop of length m, we study homopolymeric single-stranded nucleic acid chains under external force and varying temperature. In the thermodynamic limit of a lon...

The dependence of aluminum (Al) melting temperature on particle size was studied using a differential scanning calorimeter and thermogravitmetric analyzer for particles encapsulated in an oxide shell. Pressure generation within the Al core leads to an increase in melting temperature in comparison with traditional melting temperature depression calculated using the Gibbs−Thomson equation. On the...