Publications related to Living polymerization

In vivo polydopamine coating of Rhodobacter sphaeroides for enhanced electron transfer

Ardemis Anoush Boghossian, Melania Reggente, Fabian Fischer

Recent advances in coupling light-harvesting microorganisms with electronic components have led to a new generation of biohybrid devices based on microbial photocatalysts. These devices are limited by the poorly conductive interface between phototrophs and ...

2024

Bottlebrush Dielectric Elastomers with Improved Properties for Actuation

Yeerlan Adeli

Dielectric elastomer actuators (DEA) are elastic capacitors composed of a pair of compliant electrodes and a soft dielectric elastomer film sandwiched in between. This kind of stretchable capacitors can be actuated when charged, can generate electricity fr ...

EPFL2023

Architecturally Diverse Polymer Brushes Prepared via Surface-Initiated Atom Transfer Radical Polymerization

Sabrina Sant

Polymer brushes, which are polymers anchored to a solid substrate by one chainend, have the ability to modify the properties of an underlying substrate, offering intriguing features such as enhanced lubrication, reduced friction, colloidal stability, and a ...

EPFL2023

Separable Brønsted acidic imidazolium salts for polysaccharide hydrolysis in water

Kedar Ashok Abhyankar

The current reliance on limited petrochemical resources and the resulting ecological outcomes have made the exploration of alternative chemical and energy feedstocks invaluable. As such, the development of sustainable processes with a less harmful total en ...

EPFL2023

On-Demand Cross-Linkable Bottlebrush Polymers for Voltage- Driven Artificial Muscles

Frank Nüesch, Francis Owusu, Yeerlan Adeli

Dielectric elastomer actuators (DEAs) generate motion resembling natural muscles in reliability, adaptability, elongation, and frequency of operation. They are highly attractive in implantable soft robots or artificial organs. However, many applications of ...

AMER CHEMICAL SOC2023

Tailor-made Piezoelectric Elastomer Materials

Francis Owusu

Recent advancements in miniature devices with higher computational capabilities and ultralow power consumption have accelerated the development of wearable sensors, actuators, and energy harvesters everywhere. The ultimate aim of such a technological revol ...

EPFL2023

Supramolecular Polymer Brushes Grown by Surface-Initiated Atom Transfer Radical Polymerization from Cucurbit[7]uril-based Non-Covalent Initiators

Harm-Anton Klok, Friederike Katharina Metze, Irene Filipucci

Polymer brushes are densely grafted, chain end-tethered assemblies of polymers that can be produced via surface-initiated polymerization. Typically, this is accomplished using initiators or chain transfer agents that are covalently attached to the substrat ...

Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH2023

Revealing the Formation Dynamics of Janus Polymer Particles: Insights from Experiments and Molecular Dynamics

Philip Robin Loche

Seeded emulsion polymerization is one of the best-known methods for preparing polymer particles with a controlled size, composition, and shape. It first requires the preparation of seed particles, which are then swollen with additional monomer (the same as ...

Amer Chemical Soc2023

Influence of the molecular weight and physical properties of a thermoplastic polymer on its dynamic wetting behavior

Valentin Rougier

The wetting dynamics of molten thermoplastic polymers, which are known to influence the force balance of the triple line, are not understood properly despite their importance in many industrial processes. In particular, the influence of the molecular weigh ...

Elsevier2023

Amine Functionalization in Porous Adsorbents for Carbon Capture and Conversion

Anita Justin

Metal-organic Frameworks (MOFs) are a class of crystalline porous materials with exceptionally high surface area, chemical tunability and stability. Due to alarming CO2 emission and global concern, research is focused on developing porous materials like MO ...

EPFL2022

Protein Engineering for Personalized therapy and diagnosis

Lixia Wei

Protein Engineering, especially protein post-translational modification (PTM), ex-tends proteomes in a more complex way than one can expect from analysis of their encod-ing genomes. It can activate or deactivate certain catalytic functions, add new desired ...

EPFL2022

Ring-Opening Reactions of Aminocyclopropanes and Aminocyclobutanes

Mingming Wang

Nitrogen-containing compounds are an important class of molecules in medicinal chemistry, chemical biology, biochemistry, material sciences or environmental sciences. Organic nitrogen occurs in many forms, ranging from small building blocks such as urea, a ...

EPFL2022

Competitive Dehydrogenation and Backbone Fragmentation of Superhydrogenated PAHs: A Laboratory Study

Eduardo Carrascosa Casado, Robert Richter

Superhydrogenated polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) have been suggested to catalyze the formation of H-2 in certain regions of space, but it remains unclear under which circumstances this mechanism is viable given the reduced carbon backbone stabilit ...

2021

Succinimidyl Carbonate-Based Amine-Reactive Polymer Brushes: Facile Fabrication of Functional Interfaces

Harm-Anton Klok

Polymeric coatings that can undergo effective functionalization with ligands and (bio)molecules necessary for intended applications are widely employed to engineer functional interfaces. Herein, amine-reactive polymer brushes are fabricated using a succini ...

2021

Controlling lignin solubility and hydrogenolysis selectivity by acetal-mediated functionalization

Jeremy Luterbacher, Anastasiia Komarova, Graham Reid Dick

Existing lignocellulosic biomass fractionation processes produce lignin with random, interunit C-C bonds that inhibit its depolymerization and constrain its use. Here, we exploit the aldehyde stabilization of lignin to tailor its structure, functionality, ...

2022

Three-dimensional fabrication of sub-micron optical waveguides in PDMS and other polymer materials

Giulia Panusa

Optical waveguides are one of the most important photonic components. They are indispensable tools in many of todayâ s technologies because of their capacity of guiding light. In particular, compact, low loss, flexible polymer optical waveguides are cruci ...

EPFL2021

Direct, Mediated, and Delayed Intramolecular Singlet Fission Mechanism in Donor-Acceptor Copolymers

Anne-Clémence Corminboeuf, Maria Fumanal Quintana

Donor-acceptor (D-A) extended copolymers have shown great potential to be exploited for intramolecular singlet fission (iSF) because of their modular tunability and intrinsic ability to incorporate low-lying charge-transfer (CT) and a triplet-pair (1TT) st ...

2020

Preparation of Highly Porous Metal-Organic Framework Beads for Metal Extraction from Liquid Streams

Wendy Lee Queen, Emad Oveisi, Daniel Teav Sun, Shuliang Yang, Li Peng, Olga Trukhina, Olga Syzgantseva, Ilia Kochetygov, Anita Justin, Hassan Abedini, Guanchu Lu

Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) offer great promise in a variety of gas- and liquid-phase separations. However, the excellent performance on the lab scale hardly translates into pilot- or industrial-scale applications due to the microcrystalline nature of ...

AMER CHEMICAL SOC2020

Complex polymer topologies and polymer-nanoparticle hybrid films prepared via surface-initiated controlled radical polymerization

Harm-Anton Klok, Piotr Mocny

Advances in controlled radical polymerization over the past two decades have transformed the ability to produce molecularly well-defined, chain-end tethered polymer brush films. The assets of controlled radical polymerization reactions have impacted the sy ...

PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD2020

Tandem electrospinning for heterogeneous nanofiber patterns

Silvestro Micera

Smart nanofibrillar constructs can be a promising technological solution for many emerging and established fields, facilitating the potential impact of nano-scale strategies to address relevant technological challenges. As a fabrication technique, electros ...

IOP PUBLISHING LTD2020