Pore Research tools

The first membrane separation was performed with nitrocellulose in 1855. During the following 100 years, the technology played a limited role as a research tool in analytical chemistry. A major breakthrough occurred in 1958-1961 when the anisotropic or asymmetric membrane was developed. While membranes employed previously were uniform throughout, the upper portion of anisotropic membranes represents only 1% of the total film and is the actual filter, the other 99% acting as a support. The thinness of the membrane and the very fine pore structure promote excellent throughput for UF. 

The Laplace inversion (LI) is the key mathematical tool of the DDIF experiment. The ability to convert the measured multi-exponential decay into a distribution of decay times is crucial to the DDIF pore size distribution application. However, unlike other mathematical operations, the Laplace inversion is an ill-conditioned problem in that its solution is not unique, and is fairly sensitive to the noise in the input data. In this light, significant research effort has been devoted to optimizing the transform and understanding its boundaries [17, 53, 54],... 

Development of Advanced Reservoir Characterisation and Simulation Tools for Improved Coalbed Methane Recovery. Led by Imperial College of Science Technology and Medicine, the main objective of this project is to develop technology and tools to more accurately assess the potential for improved methane recovery and COj sequestration by investigating the basic scientific phenomena of COj coal injection and retention. The researchers primary objective is to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of the fundamental mechanisms of water and CO2-CH4 adsorption/desorption, diffusion/counter diffusion, and 2-phase flow under simulated reservoir conditions (stress, pore pressure, and temperature). The results of these studies will then be applied to design of a CO2-ICBM recovery and COj sequestration simulator for the European industry. 

With the advent of sohd-state NMR, another powerfiil tool for the characterization of zeohtes and related materials emerged. Similarly and, in many respects, complementarily to infrared spectroscopy, solid-state NMR spectroscopy enabled investigations to be carried out of the zeolite framework, extra-frame-work cations, hydroxyl groups in zeolites, pore structure, and zeolite/adsorbate systems. The contributions of solid-state NMR to molecular sieves research is reviewed by M. Hunger and E. Brunner in Chapter 2. 

Porosity measurements include conventional techniques to assess pore volume and pore size distribution of mainly bulk gel samples. Although several physical properties, e.g. refractive index, show simple dependence on averaged porosity of the sample, it will become increasingly important to analyze the local pore structure of thin or small amount of samples. In the near future, the three-dimensional imaging with HR-TEM observation will become an important tool for researchers dealing with porous gels. 

Ubiqnitons channels and transporters shuttle various materials into and out of the cell as well as between different cellular compartments. Examples include porins in bacteria, nuclear pore complex in eukaryotic cells, transport of polypeptides into the endoplasmic reticulum, ion channels, and many others. Their functioning provides inspiration for the creation of biomimetic nano-transporters for technological applications. During the past decade, research of transport through biological and biomimetic transporters has seen increased application of precise and quantitative biophysical techniques that allow the resolution of the durations of the single molecule transport events on the single-channel level, in parallel with the development of the appropriate mathematical analysis tools. Combination of experimental and theoretical work has resulted in the development of a concepmal framework for the explanation of the transport specificity and efficiency of such nanochannels [42,44,45,47,48, 58-70]. 

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