This work provides additional insights into the identification of operating conditions necessary to overcome a current limitation to the scale-up of the breath figure method, which is regarded as an outstanding manufacturing approach for structurally ordered porous films. The major restriction concerns, indeed, uncontrolled touching droplets at the boundary. Herein, the bulk of polymeric soluti...

The fabrication process of ceramic yttria-stabilized zirconia (YSZ) and nickel oxide nanofibers by electrospinning is reported. The preparation of hollow YSZ nanofibers and aligned nanofiber arrays is also demonstrated. The influence of the process parameters of the electrospinning process, the physicochemical properties of the spinning solutions, and the thermal treatment procedure on spinnabi...

From the beginning of life with the information-containing polymers until the present era of a plethora of water-based materials in health care industry and biotechnology, polyelectrolytes are ubiquitous with a broad range of structural and functional properties. The main attribute of polyelectrolyte solutions is that all molecules are strongly correlated both topologically and electrostaticall...

We exploited the viscoelasticity of biocompatible dilute polymeric solutions, namely, dilute poly(ethylene oxide) solutions, to significantly enhance mixing in microfluidic devices at a very small Reynolds number, i.e., Re approximately 0.023, but large Peclet and elasticity numbers. With an abrupt contraction microgeometry (8:1 contraction ratio), two different dilute poly(ethylene oxide) solu...

In this study, geometrically modified microchannels fabricated using a stereolithography technique are employed to analyze micromixing of polymeric solutions. Experimental and numerical analyses were conducted evaluate the qualitative quantitative validity Newtonian fluid flow inside channels. An in-house image processing code was used dye concentration distributions resulting from complex tran...

Fluidic self-assembly is a promising pathway for parallel fabrication of devices made up of many small components. Here, we introduce 'railed microfluidics' as an agile method to guide and assemble microstructures inside fluidic channels. The guided movement of microstructures in microfluidic channels was achieved by fabricating grooves ('rails') on the top surface of the channels and also crea...

In this study, thermo-responsive polymeric nanogels were facilely prepared via one-step cross-linking copolymerization of ethylene glycol dimethacrylate/divinylbenzene and ionic liquid (IL)-based monomers, 1,n-dialkyl-3,3'-bis-1-vinyl imidazolium bromides ([CnVIm]Br; n = 6, 8, 12) in selective solvents. The results revealed that stable and blue opalescent biimidazolium (BIm)-based nanogel solut...

Modern materials processing applications and technologies often occur far from equilibrium. To this end, the processing of complex materials such as polymer melts and nanocomposites generally occurs under strong deformations and flows, conditions under which equilibrium thermodynamics does not apply. As a result, the ability to determine the nonequilibrium thermodynamic properties of polymeric ...

Micellization of surfactant solutions is a ubiquitous phenomenon in natural systems and technological processes, and its theoretical description represents one of the cornerstone problems in the physical chemistry of colloidal systems. However, successful attempts of quantitative modeling confirmed by experimental data remains limited. We show, for the first time, that the dissipative particle ...

Self-assembled polymeric micelles have been widely applied in drug delivery systems. In this study, we found that pH value of micellar system solution was the decisive factor of physical stability. Furthermore, the weak basic solution could maintain the solution clarification for a relative long time. To investigate the stability of polymeric micelles in different pH solutions, the micellar par...