We report on the preparation of both porous and non-porous poly(vinyl alcohol) (PVA) hydrogels that can be used as carriers to release proteins. Non-porous gels were prepared by freezing and thawing of aqueous PVA solutions, while porous gels were formed by adding porosigens such as NaCl or ammonium carbamate into aqueous PVA solutions. Bovine serum albumin, a model protein, was loaded into non...

Porous fibers have been identified as a means of achieving low losses, low dispersion and high birefringence among THz polymer fibers. By exploiting optical fiber fabrication techniques, two types of THz polymer porous fibers--spider-web and rectangular porous fibers--with 57% and 65% porosity have been fabricated. The effective refractive index measured by terahertz time domain spectroscopy sh...

Porous materials are ubiquitous in the universe and weathering of porous surfaces plays an important role in the evolution of planetary and interstellar materials. Sputtering of porous solids in particular can influence atmosphere formation, surface reflectivity and the production of the ambient gas around materials in space. Several previous studies and models have shown a large reduction in t...

In this article, application of various methods for evaluating and measuring porous food structures are reviewed. It is noted, that ultrasonic vibrations and waves, due to their physical properties and wide frequency interval, can successfully be applied when analyzing porous food structures. These methods have a lot of advantages when comparing them with other non-acoustic measurement methods....

Porous hydroxyapatite (HA) scaffolds with porosity-graded structures were fabricated by sequential freeze-casting. The pore structures, compressive strengths, and biocompatibilities of the fabricated porous HA scaffolds were evaluated. The porosities of the inner and outer layers of the graded HA scaffolds were controlled by adjusting the initial HA contents of the casting slurries. The interfa...

In this work, we theoretically and experimentally demonstrate a highly sensitive porous silicon membrane waveguide biosensor in the Kretschmann configuration, and show how the cladding material directly impacts the waveguide sensor detection sensitivity and resonance width. Dielectric and metal-clad porous waveguides in the Kretchmann configuration have the potential to achieve significantly en...

BACKGROUND Membrane covered drug eluting stents (DES) were prepared to prevent tumor ingrowth and to control drug release. Polyurethane (PU) is commonly used for DES coating material because of high tensile strength. The release of paclitaxel (PTX) may increase from porous PU membrane. RESULTS Polyethylene glycol (PEG) was incorporated into PU membranes to form porous structure and control th...

The Flow through saturated-unsaturated porous media is extremely important in various natural and industrial based applications. While the Darcy's law with various modifications are used to model the flow through a porous media, the flow through unsaturated porous media is largely based on conservation of mass and modified Darcy's law where non-linear relationship exists between the p...

In this article, the porous-ZnO-nanobelt film was synthesized by oxidizing the ZnSe-nanobelt film in air. The experiment results show that the porous-ZnO-nanobelt film possesses enhanced photocatalytic activity compared with the ZnO-nanobelt film, and can be used as recyclable photocatalysts. The enhanced photocatalytic activity of the porous-ZnO-nanobelt film is attributed to the increased sur...

According to the former researcher’s presented relations for flow through rock-fill porous media, the effects of physical characteristics was not studied separately. Hence, due to the application of these relations, physical characteristics of porous materials effect must be investigated separately. In various constructed physical models of porous media, the effect of several variables such as ...