Conducting polymers hold significant promise as electrode coatings; however, they are characterized by inherently poor mechanical properties. Blending or producing layered conducting polymers with other polymer forms, such as hydrogels, has been proposed as an approach to improving these properties. There are many challenges to producing hybrid polymers incorporating conducting polymers and hyd...

Conductive inks and adhesives were used in the earliest electronics. Thomas Edison was the first to propose conductive adhesives as a way to replace wires all the way back in 1904. Today, adhesives are used with conventional etched copper circuit boards and also with other Polymer Thick Film (PTF) materials to produce electronic products that can be built very efficiently. Safe, reliable and lo...

Medical polymers, such as urinary catheters are widely used biomaterials. One of the main problem for using the urinary catheters is biofilm formation on their surface, when they are used in a long time in the body. Virulence and pathogenicity of Staphylococcus epidermidis is often enhanced when growing as a biofilm. Many techniques have been presented to reduce the biofilm formation by surface...

Wen-Pin Hsieh,1,2,* Mark D. Losego,3 Paul V. Braun,2,3 Sergei Shenogin,4 Pawel Keblinski,4 and David G. Cahill2,3 1Department of Physics, University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois 61801, USA 2Frederick-Seitz Materials Research Laboratory, University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois 61801, USA 3Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois 61801, USA 4Depa...

Recently, a new family of low-cost x-radiation detectors have been developed, based on semiconducting polymer diodes, which are easy to process, mechanically flexible, relatively inexpensive, and able to cover large areas. To test their potential for radiotherapy applications such as beam monitors or dosimeters, as an alternative to the use of solid-state inorganic detectors, we present the dir...