A designed assembly of particles at liquid interfaces offers many advantages for development of materials, and can be performed by various means. Electric fields provide a flexible method for structuring particles on drops, utilizing electrohydrodynamic circulation flows, and dielectrophoretic and electrophoretic interactions. In addition to the properties of the applied electric field, the man...

Being able to systematically modify the electric properties of nano- and microparticles opens up new possibilities for the bottom-up fabrication of advanced materials such as the fabrication of one-dimensional (1D) colloidal and granular materials. Fabricating 1D structures from individual particles offers plenty of applications ranging from electronic sensors and photovoltaics to artificial fl...

Polyaniline (PANI)/Au composite hollow spheres were successfully synthesized using polystyrene/sulfonated polystyrene core/shell gel particle templates. The PANI shell thickness and the number of Au nanoparticles decorating the PANI could be controlled effectively by adjusting the experimental conditions. The morphology, composition, and optical properties of the resulting products were charact...

With the classical sulfonation method of polystyrene-based strongly acidic cation exchange resins, polystyrene/polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) alloy particles were sulfonated to obtain a cation exchange resin, which was then directly thermoformed to prepare a semi-interpenetrating polymer network (semi-IPN) cation exchange membrane. The effects of the swelling agent, sulfonation time and tempera...

The main goal of this study was to prepare and characterize ion exchangers on nanofibrous polystyrene matrix. Starting nanofibers were sulfonated and crosslinked at the same time by sulfuric acid. Strongly acidic cation exchanger was obtained in such a way. Anion exchanger was prepared by reaction of ethylene diamine with sulfochlorides on nanofibers acquired from sulfogroups. The polymer matri...

Among fuel cell technologies, polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs) have gained momentum at a strong pace in small to medium scale energy generation (e.g., mobile applications, transportation, etc). Historically, the development of polymer electrolytes has gone through several stages: from ionic polymers of poly(ethylene oxide)-salt complexes, polystyrene sulfonate polymers, to perfl...