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A wide range of thermoreversible gels are prepared by cooling down to ambient temperature hot aqueous polymer solutions. During the sol-gel transition, such materials may experience a volume contraction which is traditionally overlooked as…
A time-resolved experimental study on the kinetics and relaxation of the structural formation process in gelling Agar-water solutions was carried out using our custom-built torsion resonator. The study was based on measurements of three…
Biogels made of crosslinked polymers such as proteins or polysaccharides behave as porous soft solids and store large amount of solvent. These gels undergo spontaneous aging, called syneresis that consists in the shrinkage of the gel matrix…
Hydrogels behave as viscoelastic soft solids and display a porous microstructure filled with water with typical amounts of 90\%~w/w or more. As such, these materials are highly sensitive to water loss through evaporation, which impacts…
When a swollen, thermoresponsive polymer gel is heated in a solvent bath, it expels solvent and deswells. When this heating is slow, deswelling proceeds homogeneously, as observed in a toroid-shaped gel that changes volume whilst…
Dynamics of a polymer chain in solution gets significantly affected by the temperature and the frictional forces arising due to solvent viscosity. Here, using an explicit solvent framework for polymer simulation with the liberty to tune the…
The use of biocomposites on a daily basis for industrial products brings to light the influence of environmental factors on the evolution of mechanical properties. This aging has a major influence in the lifetime of any product based on…
We present a thermal activated solvent bonding technique for the formation of embedded microstrucutres in polymer. It is based on the temperature dependent solubility of polymer in a liquid that is not a solvent at room temperature. With…
We report molecular dynamics simulations of a hydrophobic polymer-chain in aqueous solution between $260 {K}$ and $420 {K}$ at pressures of $1 {bar}$, $3000 {bar}$, and $4500 {bar}$. The simulations reveal a hydrophobically collapsed state…
A recent theory suggests that the evaporation kinetics of macromolecular solutions is insensitive to the ambient relative humidity (RH) due to the formation of a `polarisation layer' of solutes at the air-solution interface. We confirm this…
In this paper we present a new one-pot synthesis method of poly(acrylate-co-acrylamide) superabsorbent polymer via partial alkaline hydrolysis of acrylamide using microwave irradiation. This method allows to hydrolysis, polymerization and…
We present results from extensive molecular dynamics simulations of collapse transitions of hydrophobic polymers in explicit water focused on understanding effects of lengthscale of the hydrophobic surface and of attractive interactions on…
Thermal phase transition temperatures of high and low melting point agarose gels were investigated by using the UV-vis spectroscopy techniques. Transmitted light intensities from the gel samples with different agarose concentrations were…
We present further evidence that gelation is an arrested phase separation in attractive colloid-polymer mixtures, based on a method combining confocal microscopy experiments with numerical simulations recently established in {\bf Nature…
The aging of aggregated structures of monoglycerides in hydrophobic medium is described by a set of different techniques. Polarized microscopy was used to study the mesomorphic behavior as a function of time. Differential scanning…
We modified native wheat starch using 15, 30, and 60 min of acid hydrolysis (AH). The non-modified and AH-modified starches were converted to highly-homogeneous thermo-plastic starches (TPS) using our two-step preparation protocol…
Supercooling of aqueous solutions below their melting point without any crystallization is a fundamentally and practically important physical phenomenon with numerous applications in biopreservation and beyond. Under normal conditions,…
We apply a set of different techniques to analyze the physical properties and phase transitions of monoglycerides (MG) in oil. In contrast to many studies of MG in water or aqueous systems, we find a significant difference in the phase…
Recent experiments and theoretical studies strongly indicate that water exhibits a liquid-liquid phase transition (LLPT) in the supercooled domain. An open question is how the LLPT of water can affect the properties of aqueous solutions.…
Porous gels -- gels with solvent-filled pores that are much larger than their mesh size -- are widely used in engineering and biomedical applications due to their tunable mechanics, high water content, and selective permeability. Among…