Filtering with mussel power

Nanomembrane allows efficient sieving of ions from liquids

27-Sep-2024 - Filters play an important role in many areas of life - from coffee filters to the purification of liquids. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research have now produced a filter made of a novel, mussel-like material. The filter, which is only around 20 millionths of a millimeter ...

Shall they go with the flow?

If and how a polymeric solution will flow in a nanoporous material

18-Dec-2020 - Printing with an ink-jet printer is part of daily life, but the same technology finds more complex applications in electronics and in protein separation. These applications, considered futuristic only few decades ago, rely on the quality of the printing process which depends on the flow of the ...

Green Chemistry: Sustainable p-xylene production

Green, sustainable and biodegradable polymers

18-Sep-2020 - Lemonade, juice and mineral water often come in PET bottles. While these are practical and functional, their production is complex and not necessarily sustainable. The starting material for terephthalic acid, which is used to produce saturated polyesters such as PET (Polyethylene terephthalate), ...

Largest Synthetic Polysaccharide Assembled

Linear 100-mer polysaccharide within 188 hours

05-May-2020 - Chemists at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces (Potsdam, Germany) have set a milestone by preparing the two largest carbohydrates ever assembled. Using an Automated Glycan Assembly (AGA) instrument originally developed at the institute they prepared a linear 100-mer and achieved ...

Nylon as a building block for transparent electronic devices?

21-Aug-2019 - Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research (MPI-P) led by Dr. Kamal Asadi have solved a four decade long challenge of producing very thin nylon films that can be used for instance in electronic memory components. The thin nylon films are several 100 times thinner than human hair ...

Stiff fibres spun from slime

Nanoparticles from the secretion of velvet worms form polymer fibres that can be recycled in water

18-Oct-2017 - Nature is an excellent teacher – even for material scientists. Researchers, including scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces, have now observed a remarkable mechanism by which polymer materials are formed. In order to capture prey, velvet worms shoot out a sticky ...

Smart polymers: Complex matter where simplicity matters

17-Sep-2014 - Physicists at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research (MPI-P) in Mainz unveil the microscopic mechanism behind the puzzling co-non-solvency effect that leads to smart polymer collapse in a mixture of good solvents. MPI-P scientists Kurt Kremer and Debashish Mukherji, together with their ...

European Inventor Award 2010 for Wolfgang Krätschmer

03-May-2010 - Wolfgang Krätschmer has been awarded the European Inventor Award 2010 in the category of „lifetime achievement” for the development of the synthesis of fullerenes like C60, the soccer-ball molecule (European Patent Document EP 0500914B1 (1991/98)). In the presence of the Spanish Crown Prince ...