Stimuli responsive polyelectrolyte hydrogels may be useful for soft robotics because of their ability to transform chemical energy into mechanical motion without the use of external mechanical input. Composed of soft and biocompatible materials, gel robots can easily bend and fold, interface and manipulate biological components and transport cargo in aqueous solutions. Electrical fields in aque...

Produced water is the largest waste stream generated in oil and gas industries. The disposal of this hypersaline wastewaters containing a mixture of different organic and inorganic compounds is a relevant issue. In this study the removal of total suspended solids (TSS) from a real Produced Water, sampled at a full scale oil refinery plant, was optimized. Coagulation experiments were conducted s...

The anionic conjugated polyelectrolyte, poly[3-(6-sulfothioatehexyl)thiophene] (P3Anionic), functions as a highly sensitive probe of membrane order, uniquely capable of sequentially detecting the three key phase transitions occurring within model phospholipid bilayers. The observed sensitivity is the result of charge-mediated, selective localisation of P3Anionic within the head-groups of the ph...

Anionic polyelectrolytes and cationic lipid membranes can self-assemble into lamellar structures ranging from alternating layers of membranes and polyelectrolytes to 'missing layer' superlattice structures. We show that these structural differences can be understood in terms of the surface-charge-density mismatch between the polyelectrolyte and membrane components by examining complexes between...

A polyelectrolyte ionomer complex (PIC) composed of cationic and anionic polymers was developed for nanomedical applications. Here, a poly(ethylene glycol)-poly(lactic acid)-poly(ethylene imine) triblock copolymer (PEG-PLA-PEI) and a poly(aspartic acid) (P[Asp]) homopolymer were synthesized. These polyelectrolytes formed stable aggregates through electrostatic interactions between the cationic ...

Polyelectrolyte complexes formed between chitosan (CS) and anionic polymers have attracted increasing interest in drug delivery. In this study, CS is copolymerized with hypromellose via a coupling reagent-mediated approach to form a water-soluble, nontoxic CS derivative, namely hypromellose-graft-CS (HC), which is subsequently complexed with carboxymethylcellulose (CMC) to generate a polyamphol...

The ageing of powdered polyelectrolyte solutions has shown that while the viscosity of these solutions decreases rapidly with time, the flocculation performance and the strength of the flocs produced does not alter over periods >200 days. This was shown for polyacrylamides of cationic, anionic and non-ionic charge. The use of tap or deionized water did not adversely affect the results unless a ...

In this work needle like hydroxy apatite were synthesized in a reverse microemulsion droplets of water in cyclohexane, separated by a cationic surfactant and co-surfactant, in the presence of Na-polyacrylate (PAA) as an anionic polyelectrolyte. Characterization of the as formed HAp nanoparticles at the room temperature were carried out by X-ray diffraction (XRD) and Fourier transform infrared s...

Layer-by-layer self-assembled polyelectrolyte shells are a new class of micro/nanocapsules with unique physicochemical properties for potential applications in drug/gene delivery. The objective of this study was to investigate the interactions of polyelectrolyte shells ( approximately 1 mum in diameter) with MCF-7 breast cancer cells and identify key parameters that affect such interactions. Ta...