Polymer-nanoclay composite materials have attracted considerable interest among materials scientists recently because of the pioneering work carried out by a research group in the Toyota Central Research Laboratories. The group applied a nylon-montmorillonite clay nanocomposite as an under-the-hood structural part in the engine compartment of an automobile with significantly improved tensile st...

Miniemulsion polymerization is one of heterogeneous polymerization method that can be effectively used to synthesis of various novel organic-inorganic nanocomposite particles. This method can provide opportunity of good incorporation between the polymer and inorganic phases in the formed submicrometer-sized particles. In this article, we report preparation polystyrene/silica nanocomposite p...

The electrical transport properties of films derived from aqueous semiconducting nanoparticle are fully described by a phenomenological model that relates intrinsic film morphology to photovoltaic response. The model is applied to a new bulk heterojunction blend, composed of organic semiconducting nanoparticles formed from the polymer donor poly[{2,6-(4,8-didodecylbenzo[1,2-b:4,5-b']dithiophene...

Tunable alkaline anion-exchange membranes based on QPMBV are synthesized using a bottom-up approach, miniemulsion copolymerization, which can incorporate functional groups into the copolymers with designated composition and high molecular weight. The mechanical and electrochemical properties of the obtained QPMBV membranes are tuned by varying the composition. It is found that the ion exchange ...

The focus of this work was to improve the aqueous emulsion polymerization of a highly water-insoluble monomer derived from plant oil, acrylated methyl oleate. Conventional emulsion polymerization requires excessive amounts of surfactant and long reaction time. Miniemulsion polymerization improved the polymerization significantly. Only a fraction of the surfactant and reaction time that was nece...

Nanocrystalline anatase TiO(2) materials with different specific surface areas and pore size distributions are prepared via sol-gel and miniemulsion routes in the presence of surfactants. The samples are characterized by X-ray diffraction, nitrogen sorption, transmission electron microscopy, and electrochemical measurements. The materials show a pure anatase phase with average crystallite size ...

We report the preparation of polyglycerol particles on different length scales by extending the size of hyperbranched polyglycerols (3 nm) to nanogels (32 nm) and microgels (140 and 220 μm). We use miniemulsion templating for the preparation of nanogels and microfluidic templating for the preparation of microgels, which we obtain through a free-radical polymerization of hyperbranched polyglycer...