Hiroshima University, Graduate School of Engineering 

Polymer Technology Lab.

Nakai・Gotoh Lab.

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 Japanese
 

  A polymer gel is a cross-linked three dimentional polymer networks that contains liquids in its internal space. It is a soft matter intermediate between a solid and a liquid. The gel shows discontinuous volume change when a external stimuli such as temperature, light and electric field, is imposed upon it. It is called a stimuli responsiveness.

  The polymer gel  swells or shrinks when external condition such as  ion strength or solvent composition is changed. It is called a phase transition. The phase transition in gels caused by four fundamental interactions, i.e. hydrogen bonding, hydrophobic interaction, van der Waals interaction and ionic interaction between ionized groups.

  There are many potential applications of the polymer gels  such as the separation of solutes or metal ions, immobilization of enzymes and drug delivery system. New application also has been developed, in which gel networks are used as a reaction, separation and/or chemo-mechanical energy transformation media, for example, adsorbents, membranes, chromatography and preparation of fine particles in the gel networks.

The organic slurry, which is discharged from the food factory, contains many useful substances. The development of dehydration process, which is substituted to existing mechanical dehydration method, without heating and adding chemicals is indispensable to recycle these substances.
     In this research, we focused on the chemical suction force of the polymer gel and develop the chemical dehydration process of the organic slurry, which uses the thermosensitive porous gel, which reversibly swells and shrinks with a temperature change.