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The research team who had their paper published on the cover of Ad... |
Research team scores cover of prestigious materials journal
A team from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Electromaterials Science and the School of Chemistry has had their research on a biomaterial selected as the cover for a special issue of Advanced Functional Materials.
Advanced Functional Materials is one of the world’s leading scientific journals in the materials science field. The special issue (number 23) focused on cutting edge work in the area of “Frontiers of Nanoscience/Nanomaterials”. The title of their paper was “Spinning Carbon Nanotube-Gel Fibers Using Polyelectrolyte Complexation.
In their paper, the team described their approach to producing carbon nanotube-gel fibers by combining polyelectrolyte complexation of two oppositely charged biopolymers with continuous flow spinning.
Throughout the history of carbon nanotube research, the creation of usable nanotube fibers has been a major goal. Carbon nanotubes are allotropes of carbon with a nanostructure that can have a length-to-diameter ratio of up to 28,000,000:1[1], which is significantly larger than any other material. These cylindrical carbon molecules have novel properties that make them potentially useful in many applications in nanotechnology, electronics, optics and other fields of materials science (Source: Wikipedia].
The UOW team showed that their carbon nanotube-gel fibers produced using the commonly used food additive, gellan gum, resulted in fascinating biomaterials. Recently, it has been shown that gellan gum has potential as a scaffold for tissue engineering applications.