Competitive Adsorption between a Polymer and Solvents onto Silica

Effective Industry-Academia Collaboration Driving Polymer Innovation

Polymer science is one of the few fundamental research fields where the results can be transferred into real-life products almost immediately. Industries need collaborations with the best researchers (universities or national laboratories) to elevate the field and favor the development of new materials, which will boost the chemical and materials business economy and ensure that innovative and sustainable polymer products are constantly being brought to the market. The mechanisms to ensure a seamless and fruitful collaboration are numerous, but few approaches really manage to incorporate the full range of polymer research from a molecular understanding to a macroscopic control of properties. We review some of the main components of standard industry-academia collaborations and propose to develop polymer open centers that put the business development objective as the starting point of the collaboration and allow those to gather and focus on different scientific fields toward a common objective.

Biomass-derived carbon-based and silica-based materials for catalytic and adsorptive applications- An update since 2010

Biomass, which defined as plant- or animal-based materials, is intriguing tremendous scientific attentions due to its renewable attribute in serving energy security. Amongst, the plant-based biomasses, particularly those that co-generated in the agriculture activities, are commonly regarded as fuel for burning, which overlooked their hidden potentials for high-end applications. Organically, the plant-based biomass constitutes of lignocellulose components, which can be served as promising precursors for functionalized carbon materials. Meanwhile, its inorganic counterpart made up of various minerals, with Si being the most concerned one. With the advancement of biomass technologies and material synthesis in recent years, numerous attempts were endeavoured to obtain valorised products from biomass. Particularly, syntheses of catalytic and adsorptive materials are actively researched in the field of biomass reutilization. Herein, our work systematically summarized the advancements of biomass-materials for these applications in recent 10 years (2010-2020), with a special focus on the carbon-based and Si-based catalytic/adsorptive materials. Significantly, the deriving steps, inclusive of both pre-treatment and post-treatment of such materials, are incorporated in the discussion, alongside with their significances revealed too. The performance of the as-obtained materials in the respective application is systematically correlated to their physicochemical properties, hence providing valuable insights to the readers. Challenges and promising directions to be explored are raised too at the end of the review, aiming to advocate better-usage of biomass while offering great opportunities to sustain catalysis and adsorption in the industrial scale.