Amorphous systems water-solid interactions

In summary, it is clear that water absorbs into amorphous polymers to a significant extent. Interaction of water molecules with available sorption sites likely occurs via hydrogen bonding such that the mobility of the sorbed water is reduced and the thermodynamic state of this water is significantly altered relative to bulk water. Yet accessibility of the water to all potential sorption sites appears to be dependent on the previous history and physical-chemical properties of the solid. In this regard, the water-solid interaction in amorphous polymer systems is a dynamic relationship depending quite strongly on water activity and temperature. 

Probing Water-Solid Interactions in Crystalline and Amorphous Systems Using Vibrational Spectroscopy... 

Interactions between water vapor and amorphous pharmaceutical solids were evaluated using isothermal microcalorimetry. " The desorption of water from theophylline monohydrate has been investigated using microcalorimetric approaches.The properties of surfactants and surface-active drugs in solution were studied by Attwood et al. " using calorimetry, while titration microcalorimetry has been utilized to elucidate the nature of specific interactions in several pharmaceutical polymer-surfactants systems. " Drug decomposition was evaluated as a function of different... 

The porous and amorphous structure of the resulting oxide overlayer is also interesting to discuss. The differential thermal analysis showed that at least six water molecules per C03O4 are involved in the overlayer structure. This is not surprising when one deals with a hydrous metal hydroxide layer, and the fact that such a structure behaves as amorphous in x-ray diffractometry does not preclude the existence of the crystalline domains of dimensions lower than 5x5 nm. The catalytic activity of this system is probably explained better in terms of the local interactions of the oxygen molecules with the cations of the oxide by considering a microscopic approach based on the quantum-chemical theory of the chemical bond in the small-sized solid clusters. 

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