This study investigates the stabilization of oil/water emulsions as a function of addition of a biopolymer (scleroglucan) which acts as an emulsion stabilizer. Rheological characterization in the form of controlled stress creep measurements has been carried out and it reveals the colloidal gel exhibiting a delayed yielding in a certain applied stress window. The delay time and stresses that an emulsion can withstand depend strongly on the concentration of added scleroglucan. Increasing polymer concentration, however, is limited to a maximum value, above which a limited effect on the delay time is observed. Investigating of the emulsion under study was visualized by means of cryo transmission electron microscopy which shows adsorption of scleroglucan onto the surface of the oil particles and a gel-like structure that connects the oil phases. The results mentioned in this study support that scleroglucan-surfactant interactions play a key role in the stabilization of the oil/water emulsion.

We calibrate the lateral mode AFM (LFM) by determining the position-sensitive photodetector (PSPD) signal dependency on the lateral tip displacement, which is analogous to the constant-compliance region in normal-force calibration. By stick-slip on stiff, amorphous surfaces (silica or glass), the lateral tip displacement is determined accurately using the feedback loop control of AFM system. The sufficiently high contact stiffness between the Si AFM tip and stiff, amorphous surfaces substantially reduces the error of PSPD signal dependency on the lateral tip displacement. No damage or modification of the AFM probe is involved and only a clean silicon or glass wafer is needed.

In this study, we investigated the Stabilization of bitumen emulsions by scleroglucan, a rigid triple-helix forming biopolymer, in combination with a pH-sensitive cationic surfactant. Various aspects of the emulsification process and the final composition influence the Stabilization. We examined two different methods to add scleroglucan to the emulsion: either by adding it to the aqueous surfactant solution before emulsification, denoted ‘pre-emulsification addition’ (pre-EA), or by addition to the emulsion after emulsification (post-EA). We investigated scleroglucan concentrations in the aqueous phase ranging between 0.017 and 0.07 w/w%. The emulsions were evaluated according to the European EN 13808 standard used for cationic bituminous emulsions, as well as by rheological analysis. We observed an improvement of the storage stability upon pre-EA at a biopolymer concentration as low as 0.017 w/w% in combination with an increased particle size, whereas the breaking index (characterising breaking of the emulsion in presence of ‘aggregates’ = stones) was not influenced. The rheological data show a minor viscosity increase by scleroglucan in the pre-EA formulation at low scleroglucan concentrations (0.017–0.05 wt.%) where Stabilization already improved dramatically. This indicates that the stabilization mechanism is not only governed by a viscosity increase but also by interfacial stabilisation effects were polymer is adsorbed onto the adsorbed surfactant. In a separate experiment we changed the conformation of scleroglucan by subjecting it to extreme pH values and by dissolution in DMSO, in order to study the role of the triple helix conformation in the stabilization mechanism. Scleroglucan becomes less effective in a denatured and hydrolysed state confirming the crucial role of the triple helix conformation in the Stabilization of bitumen emulsions.

Dielectric relaxation spectroscopy (DRS) of poly(ε-caprolactone) with different draw ratios showed that the mobility of polymer chains in the amorphous part decreases as the draw ratio increases. The activation energy of the α process, which corresponds to the dynamic glass transition, increases upon drawing. The enlarged gap between the activation energies of the α process and the β process results in a change of continuity at the crossover between the high temperature a process and the α and β processes. At low drawing ratios the a process connects with the β process, while at the highest drawing ratio in our measurements, the a process is continuous with the α process. This is consistent with X-ray diffraction results that indicate that upon drawing the polymer chains in the amorphous part align and densify upon drawing. As the draw ratio increases, the α relaxation broadens and decreases its intensity, indicating an increasing heterogeneity. We observed slope changes in the α traces, when the temperature decreases below that at which τ_α ≈ 1 s. This may indicate the glass transition from the ‘rubbery’ state to the non-equilibrium glassy state.

This paper describes a novel method to fabricate porous graphene oxide (PGO) from GO by exposure to oxygen plasma. Compared to other methods to fabricate PGO described so far, e.g. the thermal and steam etching methods, oxygen plasma etching method is much faster. We studied the development of the porosity with exposure time using atomic force microscopy (AFM). It was found that the development of PGO upon oxygen-plasma exposure can be controlled by tapping mode AFM scanning using a Si tip. AFM tapping stalls the growth of pores upon further plasma exposure at a level that coincides with the fraction of sp² carbons in the GO starting material. We suggest that AFM tapping procedure changes the bond structure of the intermediate PGO structure, and these stabilized PGO structures cannot be further etched by oxygen plasma. This constitutes the first report of tapping AFM as a tool for local mechano-chemistry.

We analyze a near-second-order transition occurring in solutions of living polymers confined by two parallel surfaces in equilibrium with a reservoir solution. The molecular self-consistent field theory in the regime of weak adsorption or depletion is mapped to phenomenological Landau theory, where the order parameter is the average degree of polymerization or, equivalently, the normalized chain-end concentration. The distance between two surfaces at which the transition occurs scales as c2|c| where c is the correlation length of the polymer solution in the reservoir and c-1 is de Gennes adsorption length. In the second half of the paper we focus on experimentally observable features. The predicted transition can be detected experimentally by probing the living-polymer mediated disjoining potential between surfaces by means of, e.g., colloidal probe atomic force microscopy. To facilitate experimental investigations we derive simple explicit expressions for the disjoining potential for several regimes. By comparison with full numerical calculations it was verified that these are quite accurate.