Soft Matter Blog

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The latest issue of Soft Matter is now online. You can read the full issue here:

The outside front cover features an article on Extensional Opto-rheometry with Biofluids and Ultra-dilute Polymer Solutions by Simon J. Haward, Vivek Sharma and Jeffrey A. Odell.

Binding of 6-mer single-stranded homo-nucleotides to poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene): specific hydrogen bonds with guanine is the article highlighted on the inside front cover by Bruno Teixeira-Dias, David Zanuy, Jordi Poater, Miquel Solà, Francesc Estrany, Luis J. del Valle and Carlos Alemán.
 

Issue 21 contains the following Highlight and Review articles:

• Helical Assemblies from Chiral Block Copolymers   
• Hydrophilic and superhydrophilic surfaces and materials 
• Nanostructuring Polymers, Colloids, and Nanomaterials at the Air-Water Interface through Langmuir and Langmuir-Blodgett Techniques
  

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Read for free until November 18>> 

Sundew plants (Drosera) capture insects using tiny drops of a viscoelastic fluid. Researchers have used simple capillary thinning microrheometry to study the rheology and non-Newtonian flow behaviour of these mucilage drops. They have provided new insight into the ‘capture mechanism’ of the sundew plant, also suggesting that this biofluid could be a model material for processing biodegradable fibers.

Microrheometry of sub-nanolitre biopolymer samples: non-Newtonian flow phenomena of carnivorous plant mucilage
Philipp Erni, Matthieu Varagnat, Christian Clasen, Jérôme Crest and Gareth H. McKinley
Soft Matter, 2011,
DOI: 10.1039/C1SM05815K

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Image taken from: Mechanics of random fiber networks—a review, Soft Matter, 2011.

Rheology for Entangled Polymers: Toolkit for Analysis of Theory and Experiment.

Reptate is a software package developed as part of the Microscale Polymer Processing project with collaborators from the University of Leeds and the University of Reading. The main authors of the software were Jorge Ramierez and Alexi Likhtman. Reptate was highlighted by Tom McLeish in a recent talk at the Physical Aspects of Polymer Science conference,  as a wonderful tool for those studying the rheological behaviour of polymers.

Reptate provides a platform where experimental rheological data can be easily compared to theoretical predictions for the behaviour of entangled polymers. The software includes both classical and current theories of polymer dynamics. As well as a tool for understanding experimental data, Reptate could be used to design polymers for specific applications; the properties are chosen, the polymer architecture inferred and the polymer designed. Reptate is available online at reptate.com and is provided for free. More information can be found here.

Recent papers on understanding entangled polymer behaviour:

Linking models of polymerisation and dynamics to predict branched polymer structure and flow, Science (2011).

Counting polymer knots to find the entanglement length, Soft Matter (2011).

Microscopic origin of the terminal relaxation time in polymer nanocomposites: an experimental precedent, Soft Matter (2011).