We report on the synthesis, microstructure and mass transport properties of a colloidal hydrogel self-assembled from a mixture of colloidal silica and nontronite clay plates at different particle concentrations. The gel-structure had uniaxial long-range anisotropy caused by alignment of the clay particles in a strong external magnetic field. After gelation the colloidal silica covered the clay ...

QIAN ZHAO: CO2-mediated formation of polymer/clay nanocomposites (Under the direction of Edward T. Samulski) In this thesis, the feasibility of scCO2 as both a processing medium and a polymerization medium for preparation of polymer/clay nanocomposites has been explored, with the first part discussing a CO2-mediated intercalation of poly(ethylene oxide) (PEO) in clay. It has been shown that CO2...

Isolated Escherichia coli K-12 cell envelopes or Bacillus subtilis 168 cell walls were reacted with smectite or kaolinite clay in distilled deionized water (pH 6.0); unbound envelopes or walls were separated by sucrose density gradient centrifugation, and the extent of adsorption was calculated. At saturation, both clays adsorbed approximately 1.0 mg (dry weight) of envelopes or walls per mg (d...

This study investigated the effects of layered clay on the thermal curing behavior and tensile properties of resole phenol-formaldehyde (PF) resin/clay/cellulose nanocomposites. The thermal curing behavior of the nanocomposite was characterized using conventional differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) and temperature modulated (TMDSC). The addition of clay was found to accelerate resin curing,...

We evaluated a laser-based noncontacting method to measure the elastic anisotropy of horizontal shale cores. Whereas conventional transducer data contained an ambiguity between phase and group velocity measurements, small laser source and receiver footprints on typical core samples ensured group velocity information in our laboratory measurements. With a single dense acquisition of group veloci...

We use a simple toy-model to discuss global MHD modes of a neutron star, taking into account the magnetic coupling between the elastic crust and the fluid core. Our results suggest that the notion of pure torsional crust modes is not useful for the coupled system, all modes excite Alfvén waves in the core. However, we also show that the modes that are most likely to be excited by a fractured cr...

We investigate the sample of 1175 new nonmagnetic DA white dwarfs with the effective temperatures Teff ≥ 12000 K, which were extracted from the Data Release 1 of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. We determined masses, radii, and bolometric luminosities of stars in the sample. The above parameters were derived from the effective temperatures Teff and surface gravities log g published in the DR1, and...

Introduction Reconstruction of past climate change can provide us valuable information about the time, scale, and details of climate changes. For reconstruction of late quaternary cl...

The LPC “Linear Predictive Coding” algorithm is a widely used technique for voice coder. In this paper we present different implementations of the LPC algorithm used in the majority of voice decoding standard. The windowing/autocorrelation bloc is implemented by three different versions on an FPGA Spartan 3. Allowing the possibility to integrate a Microblaze processor core a first solution cons...

In this paper, we extend Schweizer’s open club model to clubs with goods that have a semipublic nature rather than a pure public nature. We study limit core allocations, which are those allocations that remain in the core of a replicated economy. An equivalent notion for open clubs with pure public goods was Schweizer’s concept of club efficiency under a variable number of economic agents. We s...