An extension of the Asakura-Oosawa-Vrij model of hard sphere colloids and nonadsorbing polymers is studied with grand canonical Monte Carlo simulations and density functional theory. Polymer nonideality is taken into account through a repulsive step-function pair potential between polymers. Simulation results validate previous theoretical findings for the shift of the bulk fluid demixing binoda...

The knowledge of the area of interfaces between phases is important to understand and quantify many flow and transport processes in porous media. In this work, we apply the interfacial tracer technique to study the dependence of fluid-fluid interfacial area on saturation and wettability. The interfacial area between the wetting and the nonwetting phases (brine and decane) in unconsolidated poro...

Silver nanoparticles capped by a variety of organic ligands (i.e., 1-hexanethiol, 1-octyne, and 4-trifluoromethylphenyl fragments) were synthesized by a chemical reduction route, with the resulting nanoparticles denoted as AgSC6, AgHC8, and AgPhCF3, respectively. The nanoparticle structures were characterized by using a variety of techniques including NMR, UV-vis, infrared, thermogravimetric an...

Pancreatic triglyceride lipase (PTL) and the homologous pancreatic lipase related protein 2 (PLRP2) provide a unique opportunity to understand the molecular mechanism of lipolysis. They differ in substrate specificity, sensitivity to bile salts, and colipase dependence despite their close amino acid and tertiary structure identity. One important structure, present in both lipases, is the lid wh...

Three series of 22-residue peptides derived from the transmembrane M2 segment of the glycine receptor alpha1-subunit (M2GlyR) have been designed, synthesized, and tested to determine the plasticity of a channel-forming sequence and to define whether channel pores with enhanced conductive properties could be created. Sixteen sequences were examined for aqueous solubility, solution-association te...

Infrared-visible sum frequency generation spectroscopy (SFG) was used to measure the interfacial concentrations of poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA)/polystyrene (PS) blends next to a sapphire substrate. The acid-base interactions of carbonyl groups of PMMA with the hydroxyl groups on the sapphire drive the interfacial segregation of PMMA next to the sapphire substrate. Using the shift of sapphir...

The study of the modification of interfacial properties between an organic solvent and aqueous electrolyte solutions is presented by using electrostatic dissipative particle dynamics (DPD) simulations. In this article, the parametrization for the DPD repulsive parameters a(ij) for the electrolyte components is calculated considering the dependence of the Flory-Huggins χ parameter on the concent...