Separation of mixtures at nano length scales: blow torch and levitation effect

A new conceptual basis for the separation of multicomponent molecular mixtures is proposed. A separation method where different components of the mixtures are driven in opposite directions is realized by a judicious combination of two effects, viz., levitation and blow torch effects. Monte Carlo simulations of two Lennard-Jones binary mixtures with different-sized components are shown to be separated well if at least one of the components lies in the anomalous regime and the others lie in the linear regime. A separation factor of 10(8) is obtained on nano length scales as compared to 10(3), obtainable through conventional methods of separation on macrolength scales.     

Phase diagrams of binary mixtures of patchy colloids with distinct numbers and types of patches: the empty fluid regime

We investigate the effect of distinct bonding energies on the onset of criticality of low functionality fluid mixtures. We focus on mixtures of particles with two and three patches as this includes the mixture where "empty" fluids were originally reported. In addition to the number of patches, the species differ in the type of patches or bonding sites. For simplicity, we consider that the patches on each species are identical: one species has three patches of type A and the other has two patches of type B. We have found a rich phase behavior with closed miscibility gaps, liquid-liquid demixing, and negative azeotropes. Liquid-liquid demixing was found to pre-empt the "empty" fluid regime, of these mixtures, when the AB bonds are weaker than the AA or BB bonds. By contrast, mixtures in this class exhibit "empty" fluid behavior when the AB bonds are stronger than at least one of the other two. Mixtures with bonding energies ε(BB) = ε(AB) and ε(AA) < ε(BB), were found to exhibit an unusual negative azeotrope.     

Adsorption at the liquid-vapor surface of a binary liquid mixture

In a binary liquid mixture, the component possessing the lowest surface tension preferentially adsorbs at the liquid-vapor surface. In the past this adsorption behavior has been extensively investigated for critical binary liquid mixtures near the mixture's critical temperature T(c). In this fluctuation-dominated regime the adsorption is described by a universal function of the dimensionless depth zxi where xi is the bulk correlation length. Fewer studies have quantitatively examined adsorption for off-critical mixtures because, in this case, one must carefully account for both the bulk and surface crossover from the fluctuation-dominated regime (close to T(c)) to the mean-field dominated regime (far from T(c)). In this paper we compare extensive liquid-vapor ellipsometric adsorption measurements for the mixture aniline+cyclohexane at a variety of critical and noncritical compositions with the crossover theory of Kiselev and co-workers [J. Chem. Phys. 112, 3370 (2000)].     

High resolution capillary gas chromatography of aromatic compounds in multicomponent hydrocarbon mixtures

The scope of the principal techniques employed for the analysis of hydrocarbon mixtures is discussed, with emphasis on the analysis of one and two ring aromatic compounds by single column capillary gas chromatography. The paper considers both the column and the selection of the temperature regime (isothermal and temperature programmed). Much space is devoted to the characterization of the compounds by means of retention data.     

Effect of temperature on the structure of adsorption layers formed by adsorption of polymers in the transition region from dilute to semidilute solutions

The measurements of adsorption from solutions of polymers (poly(butyl methacrylate) and polystyrene) and their mixtures at various temperatures in the wide concentration region from dilute to semidilute solution have been made. The adsorption isotherms and fraction of bound segments confirm the existence of the transition concentration region near the critical concentration of the chain overlapping when the change of adsorption mechanisms take place. The effect of temperature on adsorption from the mixtures is different for both the polymers depending on the concentration regime. For PBMA, which adsorbs from the mixtures preferentially, the adsorption isotherms are of the same shape as for adsorption from binary solutions and are characterized by the presence of a small forepart in the transition region and by increasing adsorption with temperature. For less adsorbing PS by transition from dilute to semidilute regime the inversion of the temperature effect on adsorption is observed. These results are confirmed by the estimations of the parameters of preferential adsorption at various temperatures. The data on the fraction of bound segments for dilute regime corresponds to the extended conformation of chains at the surface. The transition to semidilute regime leads to the diminishing of the fraction of bound segments as a result of simultaneous adsorption of macromolecular aggregates. Values of adsorption layer thickness have been calculated for various solution regimes and concentration. The dependence of the adsorption layer thickness on the temperature and on the solution regime at which adsorption occurs was established.     

Rapid thin-layer chromatographic separation of cocaine from codeine,heroin, 6-monoacetylmorphine,morphine and quinine on microscope slides

A thin-layer chromatographic method is reported for the separation of cocaine from codeine, heroin, 6-monoacetylmorphine, morphine and quinine on microscope slides. The method involves the use of sodium hydroxide-impregnated silica gel G microchromatoplates and acetone-benzene (50:50) as developer. Cocaine separates as a distinct spot while quinine and the morphinoid alkaloids separate collectively as one large spot near the point of application. Preliminary data suggest that the procedure will separate cocaine from aspirin and caffeine, and also from mixtures containing aspirin, caffeine, quinine, codeine, heroin. 6-monoacetylmorphine and morphine.     

Fluorescent 'two-faced' polymer wafers with embedded pyrene-functionalised gelator nanofibres

Pyrene-functionalised gelators self-assemble into nano-fibrillar organogels in DMSO/styrene/divinylbenzene mixtures, which when polymerised yield polymer wafers with two distinct faces, only one of which is fluorescent and has embedded gelator nanofibres.     

Selective Polymerization Catalysis from Monomer Mixtures: Using a Commercial Cr‐Salen Catalyst To Access ABA Block Polyesters

ABA triblock polyesters are synthesized using a commercially available chromium salen catalyst, in one pot, from monomer mixtures comprising epoxide, anhydride and lactone. The catalysis is highly selective and applies a single catalyst in two distinct pathways. It occurs first by epoxide/anhydride ring‐opening copolymerization and subsequently by lactone ring‐opening polymerization. It is used to produce various new ABA polyester polyols; these polyols can undergo post‐functionalization and chain‐extension reactions. The ability to use a commercial catalyst and switchable catalysis with monomer mixtures is expected to facilitate future explorations of new classes of block polymers.     

Combinatorial synthesis and characterization of metal-open frameworks in mild and friendly conditions: application to CO₂ adsorption

Combinatorial screening using precipitation methods at room temperature can lead to a great diversity of carboxylate based Metal Organic Frameworks (MOFs) including already known or original porous solids. The investigation of the synthesis of MOFs in different solvent and solvent mixtures includes the use of solvents such as alcohols and tetrahydrofuran (THF) which would greatly facilitate large scale production. We also show the application of Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and clustering techniques on large libraries of XRD diffraction files in order to identify classes of similar phases and peculiar phases. The combinatorial screening of 105 samples in the La/btc system has led to the identification of two phases which are solvent depending. On the La(btc) compound, the CO? adsorption measurements reveal a guest-host interactions as supported by XRD phase transformation upon thermal treatment. The mass transport can be assigned to a "single file diffusion" regime due to the one dimensional channel porous structure associated to small pore size.     

The analysis of mixtures: IV

The analysis of mixtures has been re-examined and extended. The results have been applied to several mixtures, including steroids, distilled from a direct insertion probe with promising results. An experimental scheme is described to enable the determination of the number of components in a mixture by two distinct methods. This work forms an early stage in a general mixtures analysis system.     

Femtosecond time resolved coherent anti-Stokes Raman spectroscopy: experiment and modelization of speed memory effects on H2-N2 mixtures in the collision regime

With the aim of temperature diagnostic, femtosecond time-resolved CARS (coherent anti-Stokes Raman spectroscopy) is applied to probe H2 in H2-N2 mixtures. In a first part, a Lorentzian profile is used to model the femtosecond CARS response. A difference between the experimental broadening and the expected one is observed in the collision regime. The observed broadening increases strongly in an inhomogeneous way with respect to the perturber concentration. This is of considerable importance for temperature measurements. In a second part, we show that in the collision regime, this inhomogeneous broadening is due to the speed dependence of the collisional parameters and the memory effects of the radiator speed. A new modelization of the time-resolved CARS response taking into account the speed memory effects is presented and applied to the temperature diagnostic in H2-N2 mixtures. The numerical results are in good agreement with experiments.     

Breakdown of the Stokes-Einstein relationship: role of interactions in the size dependence of self-diffusivity

Einstein and others derived the reciprocal dependence of the self-diffusivity D on the solute radius r(u) for large solutes based on kinetic theory. We examine here (a) the range of r(u) over which Stokes-Einstein (SE) dependence is valid and (b) the precise dependence for small solutes outside of the SE regime. We show through molecular dynamics simulations that there are two distinct regimes for smaller solutes: (i) the interaction or Levitation effect (LE) regime for solutes of intermediate size and (ii) the D proportional, variant 1/r(u)(2) for still smaller solutes. We show that as the solute-solvent size ratio decreases, the breakdown in the Stokes-Einstein relationship leading to the LE regime has its origin in dispersion interaction between the solute and the solvent. These results explain reports of enhanced solute diffusion in solvents existing in the literature seen for small solutes for which no explanation exists.     

Fluctuations and micro-heterogeneity in aqueous mixtures

The problem as to why water-water density correlations are systematically overestimated in computer simulation of aqueous mixtures is examined through an extensive molecular dynamics study of mixtures of the extended single point charge water model with a fully miscible weaker version of it, obtained by scaling down the site partial charges by a factor 2/3, thereby eliminating solute-solvent size differences. The study reveals that enhanced water correlations is a genuine physical effect, and are not an artifact of the simulations or the models, as previously suggested in the context of realistic aqueous mixtures. Rather, they correspond to the existence of strongly correlated water domains, for "weak-water" mole fraction x > 0.4, that modulate the spatial decay of the density correlations. These domains produce a prepeak in the structure factor, suggesting that simple aqueous mixture might behave just like micro-emulsions. The overestimated long range water correlations result from incorrect predictions of the asymptote of these correlations, which themselves arise from size limitations of the simulation box. However, by requiring consistency between thermodynamical and structural expressions of the concentration fluctuations, a method to predict the proper decay of the correlation function is obtained herein, inspired by the formal analogy with micro-emulsions. This study provides a new insight for the large values of the experimental Kirkwood-Buff integrals for many aqueous mixtures: these mixtures are in a Lifshitz-type regime, where concentration fluctuations compete with water domain formation.     

1,2-disubstituted ferrocenyl carbohydrate chloroquine conjugates as potential antimalarial agents

This work presents a new family of organometallic antimalarial compounds consisting of ferrocene bearing a chloroquine-derived moiety as well as a 1,2;3,5-diisopropylidene glucofuranose moiety at a cyclopentadienyl scaffold in a 1,2-substitution pattern. The synthetic route proceeds via a stereoselective functionalization of ferrocene carboxaldehyde to the 1,2-disubstituted conjugates. After complete characterization of these new, trifunctional conjugates, they were examined for their cytotoxicity in two cancerous cell lines (MDA-MB-435S and Caco2) and one non-cancerous cell line (MCF-10A), showing that increased cytotoxicity can be observed for the chloroquine ferrocenyl conjugates compared to their carbohydrate-substituted precursors. The antiplasmodial activity of the conjugates in a chloroquine-sensitive strain of Plasmodium falciparum (D10) and a chloroquine-resistant strain (Dd2) was determined. Monosubstituted conjugates 13, 14 and 15 exhibit decreasing activity with increasing alkyl chain length between the ferrocene and quinoline moiety, bifunctional conjugates 16, 17, 18 show constant activity, performing better than chloroquine in the Dd2 strain.     

Late stage of the phase-separation process: coalescence-induced coalescence, gravitational sedimentation, and collective evaporation mechanisms

We study the separation in the binary and ternary mixtures of the water/surfactant C12E5/polymer PEG system. The phase separation in the mixtures at late stages is governed by two distinct mechanisms: the coalescence-induced coalescence and the droplet evaporation mechanism. We show that when the coalescence-induced coalescence process is globally terminated in the sample consisting of a dense system of domains, another mechanism, which we call the collective droplet evaporation, starts to dominate. It manifests itself as a front of "evaporating" domains, which propagates at constant speed in the system. We show that the collective evaporation is induced by the gravitational drift of large droplets.     

Carbon dioxide in 1-butyl-3-methylimidazolium acetate. I. Unusual solubility investigated by Raman spectroscopy and DFT calculations

The unusual solubility of carbon dioxide in 1-butyl-3-methylimidazolium acetate (Bmim Ac) has been studied by Raman spectroscopy and DFT calculations. It is shown that the solubility results from the existence of two distinct solvation regimes. In the first one (CO(2) mole fraction ≤ 0.35), the usual Fermi dyad is not observed, a fact never reported before for binary mixtures with organic liquids or ionic liquids (IL). Strong experimental evidence complemented by effective DFT modeling shows that this regime is dominated by a chemical reaction leading to the carboxylation of the imidazolium ring accompanied by acetic acid formation. The reactive scheme proposed involves two concerted mechanisms, which are a proton exchange process between the imidazolium cation and the acetate anion and the carboxylation process itself initiated from the formation of "transient" CO(2)-1-butyl-3-methylimidazole 2-ylidene carbene species. In that sense, CO(2) triggers the carboxylation reaction. Moreover, this dynamic picture circumvents consideration of a long-lived carbene formation in dense phase. The second regime is characterized by the detection of the CO(2) Fermi dyad showing that the carboxylation reaction has been strongly moderated. This finding has been interpreted as due to the interaction of the acetic acid molecules with the COO group of acetate anions involved in monodentate forms with the cation. The observation of the Fermi doublet allows us to infer that CO(2) essentially preserves its linear geometry and that the nature and strength of the interactions with its environment should be comparable to those existing in organic liquids and other IL as well. These results have been supported by DFT calculations showing that the CO(2) molecule interacts with energetically equivalent coexisting structures and that its geometry departs only slightly from the linearity. Finally, we find that the CO(2) solvation in Bmim Ac and 1-butyl-3-methylimidazolium trifluoroacetate (Bmim TFA) cannot be straightforwardly compared neither in the first regime due to the existence of a chemical reaction nor in the second regime because CO(2) interacts with a variety of environments not only consisting of ions pairs like in Bmim TFA but also with carboxylate and acetic acid molecule.     

Multiphoton dissociation of C3F6 and CF2HCl

Multiphoton dissociation experiments in perfluoropropene and difluorochloromethane have been carried out with one or two wavelengths. It is shown that the increase of selectivity induced by a nonresonant radiation is attributable to an enlagement of the unimolecular reaction regime. The behaviour of large and small molecules when irradiated with two IR laser beams is different. Whereas the distinguishability between unimolecular and collisional regimes is enhanced for sufficiently large molecules, it tends to be smoothed in the case of small molecules.     

Ideal mixing behavior of the debye process in supercooled monohydroxy alcohols

Glass-forming monohydroxy alcohols exhibit two dielectric relaxation signals with super-Arrhenius temperature dependence: a Debye peak and an asymmetrically broadened alpha-process. We explore the behavior of these distinct relaxation features in mixtures of such liquids by dielectric measurements. The study focuses on the viscous regime of two binary systems: 2-methyl-1-butanol with 2-ethyl-1-hexanol and 1-propanol with 3,7-dimethyl-1-octanol. We find that the logarithmic relaxation time, log(tau), of the Debye peak follows an ideal mixing law (linear change with mole fraction), even in the case of mixing structurally dissimilar components. By contrast, the log(tau) versus mole fraction curve for the alpha-process is nonlinear, indicative of slower structural relaxation relative to the expectation on the basis of ideal mixing behavior. The latter observation is analogous to the effect of composition on viscosity, heat of mixing, and glass-transition temperature, whereas the ideal mixing of log(tau) seen for the Debye peak is the exception. We conclude that the unusual ideal mixing behavior of dielectric relaxation in monohydroxy alcohols is not a result of structural similarity, but rather yet more evidence of the Debye process being decoupled from other dynamic and thermodynamic properties.     

Miscibility of small colloidal spheres with large polymers in good solvent

Nearly athermal colloid-polymer mixtures were studied in the "protein limit." A fluid-fluid transition was observed in mixtures of stearyl-alcohol-coated silica particles and large polystyrene coils in toluene. The ratios of the polymer radius of gyration to the particle radii were q=4.1 and q=5.2. The binodal curves and the critical points were determined. Turbidity measurements and analysis for one set of particles allowed the systems to be mapped onto hard sphere-polymer mixtures. A comparison with recent predictions for the miscibility of model mixtures shows that the experimental binodals lie between the two extreme results for ideal and interacting polymers. The critical colloid volume fraction is also found to decrease with increasing size ratios.     

Discrete solvation layering in confined binary liquids

The solvation force profiles of squalane/octamethylcyclotetrasiloxane (OMCTS) mixtures confined between Si3N4 tips and highly oriented pyrolytic graphite (HOPG) and hexadecane/OMCTS confined between alkanethiol-functionalized tips and freshly cleaved mica have been measured by atomic force microscopy. Measurements on HOPG reveal oscillatory behavior where discrete solvation layers of both squalane and OMCTS are observed in a single force curve. The large repulsive force of the first solvation layer (squalane) on HOPG indicates that it is strongly bound. Oscillatory behavior is also observed for hexadecane/OMCTS on mica excepting that the oscillations are found in the attractive regime. The OMCTS layers in this case are less ordered with slightly larger (approximately 1 A) periodicities. These results are in agreement with computer simulations for binary liquid mixtures but differ qualitatively from surface force apparatus experiments.