An interdisciplinary team from the department of
macromolecular science and engineering at Case
Western Reserve University, the Louis Stokes Cleveland VA
Medical Center and the NASA Glenn Research Center earned the December
2007 cover of Nature Nanotechnology, one of the world’s most
prestigious scholarly journals covering research in nanoscience and
nanotechnology.
Jeffrey R. Capadona, associate investigator at the
VA’s Advanced Platform Technology (APT) Center and Christoph
Weder and Stuart Rowan, professors of macromolecular science and
engineering at the Case School of Engineering and their colleagues have
unveiled a method for developing mechanically-reinforced polymer
nanocomposites.
The incorporation of nanoparticles into polymers is a design
approach that is used in all areas of materials science, says Weder,
who is the senior author of the paper, adding that in the past, the
broad technological utilization of polymer nanocomposites has been
stifled by a lack of effective methods to control nanoparticle
dispersion in materials.
In their new approach, the team used a process in which the
reinforcing nanoparticles are first assembled into a three-dimensional
network through gelation of nanoparticle dispersion, essentially
forming a template. This template can then be filled with any polymer
of choice by exchanging the solvent with a polymer-containing solution.
“Through the use of this new technique, we have been
able to take the most incompatible components and show that they can be
used to make compatible materials,” Weder said.
While the research primarily focused on cellulose
“whiskers” as the choice of nanoparticles since
they offer useful mechanical properties and are readily obtained from
renewable biosources such as wood and cotton, Capadona explained, the
team also started to investigate an array of different polymers and
nanofibers, demonstrating that the technique has broad applicability.
Posted 7th January 2007
