Related papers: Large and non-linear permeability amplification wi…
The 2025 Los Angeles wildfires caused widespread urban destruction and displacement, and severe economic losses, highlighting the urgent need for better fire retardants. Current fire suppression strategies rely heavily on water, chemical…
Membranes are ubiquitous in nature with primary functions that include adaptive filtering and selective transport of chemical and molecular species. Being critical to cellular functions, they are also fundamental in many areas of science…
Polymer association at liquid-liquid interfaces is a promising way to spontaneously obtain soft self-healing membranes. In the case of reversible bonding between two polymers, the macromolecules are mobile everywhere within the membrane and…
Vesicles prepared in water from a series of diblock copolymers and termed "polymersomes" are physically characterized. With increasing molecular weight $\bar{M}_n$, the hydrophobic core thickness $d$ for the self-assembled bilayers of…
Surface effect of low-surface-tension contaminants accumulating at the evaporation surface can easily induce membrane wetting in the application of membrane distillation, especially in hypersaline scenarios. In this work, we propose a novel…
Two types of high-strength composite hydrogels possessing the structure of interpenetrating polymer networks were synthesized via free-radical polymerization of acrylamide carried out straight within the matrix of plant or bacterial…
Permeation through nanometer pores is important in the design of materials for filtration and separation techniques and because of unusual fundamental behavior arising at the molecular scale. We found that submicron-thick membranes made…
It is widely known that hydrogels, a class of soft materials made of a polymer chain network, are prone to fatigue failure. To understand the underlying mechanism, here we simulate polymer scission and fatigue initiation in the vicinity of…
Electroosmotic pumping through uncharged hydrogels can be achieved by embedding the polymer network with charged colloidal inclusions. Matos and co-workers (2006) recently used the concept to enhance the diffusion-limited flux of uncharged…
We first highlight theoretically a microfluidic configuration that allows to measure two fundamental parameters describing mass transport through a membrane: the solute permeability coefficient $\mathcal{L}_D$, and the associated reflection…
Control of the swelling, chemical functionalization, and adhesivity of hydrogels are finding new applications in a wide range of material systems. We investigate experimentally the effect of adsorbed particles on hydrogels on the depinning…
This article presents a novel computational model to study the selective filtering of biological hydrogels due to the surface charge and size of diffusing particles. It is the first model that includes the random 3D fiber orientation and…
Hydrogels are biphasic, swollen polymer networks where elastic deformation is coupled to nanoscale fluid flow. As a consequence, hydrogels can withstand large strains and exhibit nonlinear, hyperelastic properties. For low-modulus hydrogel…
In this paper, the analysis and homogenization of a poroelastic model for the hydro-mechanical response of fibre-reinforced hydrogels is considered. Here, the medium in question is considered to be a highly heterogeneous two-component media…
Understanding dynamic and complex interaction of biological membranes with extracellular matrices plays a crucial role in controlling a variety of cell behavior and functions, from cell adhesion and growth to signaling and differentiation.…
Letting free polymers diffuse from solution into a crosslinked polymer gel is often a crucial processing step in the synthesis of multiphase polymer-based gels, e.g., core-shell microgels. Here we use coarse-grained molecular dynamics…
Soft nanoparticles hold promise as smart emulsifiers due to their high degree of deformability, permeability and stimuli responsive properties. By means of large-scale simulations we investigate the structural properties of nanogels at…
A facile route for the fabrication of surface-attached hydrogel thin films with well-controlled chemistry and tailored architecture on wide range of thickness from nanometers to micrometers is reported. The synthesis, which consists in…
Graphene-based membranes have been investigated as promising candidates for water filtration and gas separation applications. Experimental evidences have shown that graphene oxide can be impermeable to liquids, vapors and gases, while…
In this work a continuum model for high frequency poroelastic longitudinal waves in hydrogels is presented. A viscoelastic force describing the interaction between the polymer network and the bounded water present in such materials is…