Growth and Branching Kinetics of Nanofibers

As has been mentioned, crystallographic mismatch nucleation is a special case of heterogeneous nucleation where the substrate is the crystal fiber. Designating the induction time for the nucleation of new fibers on the host fibers as r (r 1/J, where J is the rate of the crystallographic mismatch nucleation), the average branching distance can be expressed as 

According to 3D nucleation model, the nucleation rate J can be expressed as [20c, 27] 

GP-1/ISA gel, No additive GP-1/ISA gel, with Tween 80 GP-1/PG gel, no additive GP-i/pq gel, with span 20 Tip branching Enhanced tip branching Tip branching Side branching 

The branching mechanism described by Equation 2.23 has been verified by the linear correlation between ln[ (A/t/lkT) j and l/(A)U/kT) obtained for several gels [6c, 8, 12aj. 

In a recent work, the crystallographic mismatch-induced fiber branching of HSA was examined on a molecular scale using synchrotron Fourier transform infrared (ETIR) spectroscopy [19]. It was observed that the lengths of the HSA fibers were influenced by crystallographic mismatches resulting from the incorporation of H SA 

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