Polymer brushes are a broad class of materials consisting of a polymer chain tethered at one end to a surface. These brushes have a variety of uses given their ability to tune or modify surface proper...
Learn More

Widespread production of sustainable fuels and chemicals will require cost-effective methods for breaking down biomass into its constituent sugars. Attaining high yields of concentrated C5 and C6 carb...
Learn More

Piezoelectric materials produce electric charge in response to mechanical stress. Such materials can be utilized as very small ‘nanogenerators’ that absorb vibrations from the environment (e.g., a...
Learn More

Formaldehyde-based adhesives have been used to make interior plywood and particle board for decades. These synthetic adhesives, which are derived from petroleum, are inexpensive and perform well. Howe...
Learn More

"Orthobiologics" provides an improved method of treating fractures and other bone defects. This therapy employs inductive molecules, such as bone morphogenetic protein-2 or bone morphogeneti...
Learn More

Production of industrial chemicals has long relied on petroleum-based starting material. As reserves of fossil carbon dwindle, a new approach is looking to microorganisms and their ability to convert ...
Learn More

Plastics are the most widely used materials in the United States, surpassing steel, copper and aluminum combined by volume. While ubiquitous, fossil-based plastics are becoming more and more costly to...
Learn More

Several techniques exist for turning plastic into goods and packaging. Microcellular foams are of particular interest because they can be used to produce strong, lightweight plastic. Unfortunately, du...
Learn More

Enantiomers are pairs of compounds that have the same chemical formula but different spatial structures (like your left and right hand, they are non-superimposable mirror images of each other). This i...
Learn More

Polymer brushes are a broad class of materials made of polymer chains tethered at one end to a substrate. These brushes are able to tune and modify surface properties like bioadhesion and wettability....
Learn More

Block copolymers (BCPs) self-assemble into well-defined, highly regular and dense nanostructures. Such BCP arrays are useful for fabricating electronic devices like magnetic storage media, quantum dot...
Learn More

The lithographic process is one of the most powerful technologies of the digital electronics era. Lithography allows hundreds of millions of components to be fabricated on a single chip with pattern f...
Learn More

Microcellular injection molding produces lightweight, dimensionally stable plastic components using fewer raw materials than standard techniques.The process, also known as ‘microcellular foaming,’...
Learn More

Disulfide bonds between cysteine residues are the most common crosslinking agents in proteins. Reducing these bonds is an ordinary procedure in biochemistry and biotechnology. The most commonly used r...
Learn More

Batteries can be classified as primary (nonreusable) or secondary (rechargeable). The demand for rechargeable batteries of high energy density and specific energy has surged along with portable electr...
Learn More

Common biodegradable polymers such as poly(lactide) and poly (3-hydroxyalkanaoates) are derived from relatively expensive chemical feedstocks and have low melt stability. This presents a challenge for...
Learn More

Degradable polyelectrolytes are useful materials for a variety of biological applications, from implant coatings and immunostimulants to therapeutic and gene delivery. Many of these applications rely ...
Learn More

Lignin is a major component of non-edible biomass (15-30 percent by weight; 40 percent by energy). It is a cheap byproduct of pulp and biofuel production and is one of the few naturally occurring sour...
Learn More

Polymer-based micropellets can be formed having diameters smaller than 50 microns. The miniscule particles are vital to a number of processes like laser sintering—used to build rapid prototypes and ...
Learn More

Polymer-based pellets are utilized in plastics manufacturing. In particular, very small micropellets and powders are in special demand for processes like selective laser sintering (SLS), which require...
Learn More

Aqueous lyotropic liquid crystal (LLC) assemblies are useful for highly selective chemical separations, such as water desalination and selective ion-transporting membranes. LLCs are formed in water wh...
Learn More

Advanced metal alloys with high strength and fracture toughness are used in an increasing number of applications. However, some metal alloys like Al-Cu have been underutilized due to poor weldability....
Learn More

Medical isotopes are valuable healthcare tools for patient imaging and disease treatment. Yet most radioisotopes used in medicine are produced in nuclear reactors, which are complex, generate high vol...
Learn More

Many pharmaceuticals and other biologically active molecules contain chemical sequences called triads that are challenging to prepare in the laboratory. Specifically, triads are three or more contiguo...
Learn More

Immiscible alloys are composed of materials that meld together above a certain temperature but become unstable and separate as the solution cools. For example, elements like bismuth or tin may coagula...
Learn More