New composite membranes based on porous anodic alumina films and polymer of intrinsic microporosity (PIM-1) have been prepared using a spin-coating technique. According to scanning electron microscopy, partial penetration of polymer into the pores of alumina supports takes place giving rise to selective polymeric layers with fiber-like microstructure. Geometric confinement of rigid PIM-1 in the...

Polymer blends are proving to be important in emerging technologies including as gas separation membranes [1]. The blending of existing polymers offers the distinct advantage of being able to develop new materials with potentially synergistic properties not attainable with the individual polymer components and without the need to synthesize new macromolecules [2]. We recently developed phasesep...

Single polymer dynamics offers a powerful approach to study molecular-level interactions and dynamic microstructure in materials. Direct visualization of single polymer chains has uncovered new ideas regarding the rheology and nonequilibrium dynamics of macromolecules, including the importance of molecular individualism, dynamic heterogeneity, and molecular subpopulations in governing macroscop...

The conducting polymer polypyrrole (PPy) was electrochemically grown on hydrogel scaffolds deposited on the surface of microfabricated neural prosthetic devices. It is shown that the pyrrole monomer can be grown vertically through the hydrogel layer up to the surface without affecting the adjacent sites on the probes. The electrochemical properties of the conducting polymer-modified hydrogels w...

Uncapped, hollow polymeric microstructures were fabricated on a silicon substrate using electric field induced stretching and detachment. Initially, square or cylinder microposts were generated using a solvent-assisted capillary molding technique, and a featureless electrode mask was positioned on the top of the microstructure with spacers maintaining an air gap (∼20 μm). Upon exposure to an ex...

Among the many potential applications of carbon nanotubes (CNT), its usage to strengthen polymers has been paid considerable attention due to the exceptional stiffness, excellent strength, and the low density of CNT. This has provided numerous opportunities for the invention of new material systems for applications requiring high strength and high modulus. Precise control over processing factor...

With increasing level of polymer solution involvement in multiphase microdevice for for‐ mation of emulsion and fabrication of functional materials, it is of paramount importance to systematically understand the relevant physics of droplet formation in non-Newtonian fluids and how the material formation process may be affected due to the complex rheo‐ logical effect. The chapter aims to review ...

– A tensile blob construction for branched structures is used to explain structural sizes larger than the strand length, as observed in neutron scattering data from equilibrium swollen networks. Under this model, equilibrium swollen networks display a base structural size, the “gel tensile blob” size, ξ, that follows the scaling relationship ξ ∼ l/(1/2−χ)P , where l is the monomer length, χ is ...

SUMMARY Ionic polymer metal composites (IPMC) have been widely investigated as newly-emerging materials for transducer applications due to their good performance, such as low weight, good flexibility and large strain. A bio-inspired design was described and applied to build 3-D papillae dome structure for vectorial tactile sensors. INTRODUCTION The electrical-chemical-mechanical effect in ionic...

Substantial in-plane crystallinity and dominant face-on stacking are observed in thin films of a high-mobility n-type rylene-thiophene copolymer. Spun films of the polymer, previously thought to have little or no order are found to exhibit an ordered microstructure at both interfaces, and in the bulk. The implications of this type of packing and crystalline morphology are discussed as they rela...