News

TEDxWarwick 2013

Stefan Bon is an associate professor in Chemistry at Warwick, famously making the headlines in 2012 for halving the fat content of chocolate by replacing it with fruit juice. He studied Chemical Engineering at the Technical University of Eindhoven and has a background in developing (living) radical polymerizations. Since 2005 Bon has become an international player in the area of polymer colloids, and continues to innovate in the area.

He is the founder of the BonLab, where the study of chemistry and physics of the assembly of molecular and/or colloidal entities into complex structures is conducted. This technology is applicable in everything from sensors and devices, coatings and adhesives, to food, personal care, agricultural and biological systems.

To watch the TEDx talk, click here.

Find out more about the BonLab at www.bonlab.info.

Members of the Warwick Electrochemistry Group worked with children who attend The Grange Extended Learning Centre over a six week period. The Grange ELC is a pupil referral unit for students who have been, or are at risk of being excluded from their mainstream school. This project was coordinated by the Chemistry departments very own outreach officer Nick Barker and has been reported by local media.

The project involved the collection of soil samples from sites once occupied by car factories around the city of Coventry and then analyse these samples for heavy metal contamination. Over the first three weeks, two children worked in the laboratories at Warwick to prepare electrodes while the rest of the group, usually four children, went to old car manufacturing site like Jaguar (Brown’s Lane) and Rover (Cromwell Lane) to collect soil samples.

Here is what Manni Sahota, acting Headteacher of The Grange ELC, had to say about this outreach project:

‘I feel the project run by Prof Pat Unwin and his staff was a huge success. It raised the pupils’ self-esteem and their aspirations. They learned how to use scientific equipment and saw first-hand what a University looks like. One of the pupils even talked about becoming a scientist.'

'All the work we have ever done with Warwick University over the past few years would not be possible without Nick Barker, Teacher Fellow, who knows exactly where our pupils come from and the opportunities they would never otherwise have.’

Rachel has been awarded the 2013 Herman F. Mark Young Scholar award by the American Chemical Society. This award is presented biennially to recognize excellence in basic or applied research and leadership in polymer science by scientist aged thirty five or younger. She will be presented with this award at a special symposium at the Fall ACS conference.

http://www.polyacs.org/10.html#markscholars

Dr Matt Gibson has been awarded the RSC Macrogroup Young Researchers Medal for 2012. He will receive his medal at Conference in Durham in July this year, where he will also be giving a lecture. This medal is awarded to a UK-based scientist, normally under the age of 36 on 31 December of the preceding year, whose contributions to polymer science show outstanding promise for the future. This is excellent news for Matt and the Department of Chemistry. Congratulations to Matt!

http://www.rsc.org/Membership/Networking/InterestGroups/MacroUK/Awards/YoungResearchersMedal.asp

A lithography-free method for the fabrication of optically-thin plasmon-active metal window electrodes with a dense array of nano-sized apertures on glass and plastic substrates is reported. These remarkably robust, low sheet resistance electrodes simultaneously concentrate light and extract charge carriers in solution processed and vacuum deposited organic photovoltaics and outperform indium-tin oxide electrodes on flexible substrates

Plasmon-active nano-aperture window electrodes for organic photovoltaics

H. M. Stec, R. A. Hatton*, Advanced Energy Materials (2012) 3, 193-199.

The structures of various polymorphs of gallium oxide have been determined for the first time using neutron scattering techniques and publised in Chemistry, A European Journal. LINK

The low pressure-CVD growth of graphene on low-cost Cu foil and its resulting electronic properties has been reported by the Costantini Group in Nano Research, in collaboration with the Department of Physics, the University of St. Andrews and the ELLETRA synchrotron. In the long-term, commercialisation of graphene will require economical techniques for its fabrication on a large scale. Therefore, its growth under low-pressure conditions on low-cost polycrystalline Cu foils represents a strong step towards a number of graphene applications. Angle-resolved photoemission measurements demonstrate a weak electronic coupling between the graphene and Cu, suggesting only a weak interaction with the substrate. In contrast, during the growth process, the graphene induces interfacial reconstruction of the mostly (100) surface, forming (n10) facets that in turn further modify the growth dynamics. Consequently, two main preferred graphene orientations with respect to the Cu are found, which is shown to be a consequence of a mismatch epitaxy. Further details can be read at http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12274-013-0285-y.

Ada Della Pia and Giovanni Costantini publish the Scanning Tunnelling Microscopy chapter for the Springer Surface Science Techniques book, Gianangelo Bracco and Bodil Holst (ed).

The Gibson Group publishes in Biomaterials Science on why certain (macro)molecules are capable of inhibiting ice crystal growth, inspired by antifeeze proteins.

The work, conducted in collaboration with Warwick Medical School provides insights into which structural features are essential for a (macro)molecule to inhibit ice crystal growth and why apparently similar compounds have opposing activity.

The ability to control ice crystal growth is a major technological challenge (anyone stuck at Heathrow or scraping their car...?) with many biotechnological applications.

Read the paper here

The Jones group in collaboration with UCL, Imperial College and the LCN investigate the effect of fluorination on the magnetic properties of phthalocyanine thin films in the Journal of Applied Physics.

In a recent issue of Angewandte Chemie the Warwick team of Emanuele Maggio, Natalia Martsinovich and Alessandro Troisi reports a new design strategy to improve dye sentitized solar cells. Good dyes, when excited by solar radiation, inject very rapidly an electron to the semiconductor they are adsorbed onto. However it is also desirable that, when they have lost the electron, these dyes are not neutralized again by the semiconductor. The authors combined ideas from group theory with their methodology to study electron transfer at the interface to propose a new family of dyes that inject the electron rapidly but are very reluctant to take the electron back.

Soft materials which can be molded into specific shapes and contain emulsion droplets or bubbles are an important class of materials and find use accross a wide range of disciplines. Think for example of shaving foam, margerine spreads, etc. An important class of soft materials are so-called hydrogels, which can be made from watersoluble polymer molecules and form a gel through crosslinking a phenonomenon that interconnects the polymer chains creating a network.

Stefan Bon and his team (BonLab) now has shown that hydrogel objects which contain large amounts of oil droplets (80 vol%) can be constructed through injection (molding) of an emulsified mixture of oil and a waterborne dispersion of thermoresponsive poly(N-isopropyl acrylamide) nanogel particles, which are crosslinked through non-covalent interaction of 2-ureido-4[1H] pyrimidinone (UPy) groups.

Stefan Bon says "we are very excited that we can trap isolated oil droplets into hydrogels macroscopic objects, which can be re-shaped. For example, it is possible to make a cylindrical high internal phase emulsion hydrogel wire. The reversibility of the hydrogen bond formation means that these materials will have exciting physical and mechanical characteristics. Not only that, the use of the thermoresponsive poly(N-isopropyl acrylamide) allows us to shrink and thus squeeze the objects at elevated temperatures, which has potential interesting applications in triggered delivery of active ingredients and microscopic engines and motors."

Their findings are published in Chemical Communications (link to the paper), a journal by the Royal Society of Chemistry.