The feasibility of heat engines, coupled with an internal combustion engine and designed to increase the coefficient of efficiency of hydrocarbon or other chemical fuels, was considered. The prospects of the use of osmotic phenomena in aqueous solutions of thermosensitive polymers in order to improve the operation of heat engines were shown.

Using many-body dissipative particle dynamics (MDPD), polymer solutions with concentrations spanning dilute and semidilute regimes are modeled. The parameterization of MDPD interactions for systems with liquid–vapor coexistence is established by mapping to the mean-field Flory–Huggins theory. The characterization of static and dynamic properties of polymer chains is focused on the effects of hy...

Laser scanning confocal microscopy combined with fluorescence recovery after photobleaching is an effective tool to measure the diffusion coefficients of macromolecules in cross-linked hydrogels and polymer solutions. In this study, the effects of enzyme treatment on the diffusion of macromolecules (FITC-dextran) in guar solutions and titanium-guar hydrogels are examined. Enzyme treatment with ...

A protocol for measuring polydispersity of concentrated polymer solutions using dynamic light scattering is described. Dynamic light scattering is a technique used to measure the size distribution of polymer solutions or colloidal particles. Although this technique is widely used for the assessment of polymer solutions, it is difficult to measure the particle size in concentrated solutions due ...

In many practical flow situations solutions of flexible polymers are found to exhibit a well-known non-Newtonian viscosity enhancement effect. This is likely to be due to extensional components in the flow field, which can cause flexible polymer molecules to stretch and orientate, causing an increase in the extensional viscosity. This viscosity enhancement is important in many industrial applic...

We have developed a simple technique for the fabrication of polymer nanotubes with a monodisperse size distribution and uniform orientation. When either a polymer melt or solution is placed on a substrate with high surface energy, it will spread to form a thin film, known as a precursor film, similar to the behavior of low molar mass liquids (1, 2). Similar wetting phenomena occur if porous tem...

Electrophoretic channels are filled with a polymer matrix prior to their use in DNA separations. This process, called gel-loading, can be accomplished manually, using syringes, or can be automated through the use of small pumps or vacuum. The injection rate is constrained by the desire to minimize shear-induced degradation of the polymer molecules. Currently, the community lacks quantitative da...