The interfacial shear strength between Si microwires and a Nafion membrane has been tailored through surface functionalization of the Si. Acidic (-COOH-terminated) or basic (-NH2-terminated) surface-bound functionality was introduced by hydrosilylation reactions to probe the interactions between the functionalized Si microwires and hydrophilic ionically charged sites in the Nafion polymeric sid...

0167-6636/$ see front matter 2009 Elsevier Ltd doi:10.1016/j.mechmat.2009.11.006 * Corresponding author. Tel.: +41 21 693 4848; fa E-mail address: [email protected] (Y. Leterrie The present work investigates the saturation damage state of a two-layer coating on a substrate (layer 1/layer 2/substrate) under uniaxial tensile loading in order to derive expressions for the interfacial strength...

Systems with nanoscopic features contain a high density of interfaces. Thermal transport in such systems can be governed by the resistance to heat transfer, the Kapitza resistance (RK), at the interface. Although soft interfaces, such as those between immiscible liquids or between a biomolecule and solvent, are ubiquitous, few studies of thermal transport at such interfaces have been reported. ...

Interfacial water structures of aqueous dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) and methanesulfonic acid (MSA) were studied by Raman, infrared, and conventional and phase-sensitive vibrational sum frequency generation (VSFG) spectroscopies. Through isotopic dilution, we probed bulk water hydrogen bonding strength using the vibrational frequency of dilute OD in H(2)O. As indicated by the frequency shift of th...

Interface-binding enzymes are desirable for biphasic reactions in that they offer simultaneous access to substrates dissolved in both phases across the interface. It has been shown that conjugating water-soluble enzymes with hydrophobic polymers facilitated the assembling of enzymes at oil/water interfaces. In this work, the interfacial assembling of alpha-chymotrypsin conjugated with polystyre...

New methods are needed that can predict the clinical failure of dental restorations that primarily rely on dentin bonding. Existing methods have shortcomings, e.g. severe deviation in the actual stress distribution from theory and a large standard deviation in the measured bond strength. We introduce here a novel test specimen by examining an endodontic model for dentin bonding. Specifically, w...

Matrix resins of carbon fiber-epoxy composites with different numbers of epoxy functional groups were prepared, and their properties were compared to optimize the matrix resin composition. To understand the bonding strengths between the carbon fiber and epoxy resins in monofilaments and micro-sized resin beads, the interfacial shear strength (IFSS) was measured using the microdroplet technique....

In the present work, the room and elevated temperature mechanical behavior of Al/TiC, high-strength Al-Si/TiC and the elevated temperature-resistant Al-Fe(-V-Si)/TiC composites has been evaluated. The microstructural characteristics of ingot metallurgy (IM) or rapid solidification (RS) Al-Si/TiC and Al-Fe(-V-Si)/TiC composites could be thought of as a combination of the related alloy matrix mic...

The origins for abrupt adhesion loss at a critical relative humidity (RH) for polymeric adhesives bonded to inorganic surfaces have been explored using a model poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) film on glass. The interfacial and bulk water concentrations within the polymer film as a function of D 2O partial pressure were quantified using neutron reflectivity. Adhesion strength of these PMMA/SiO ...