Hiroshima University, Graduate School of Engineering 

Polymer Technology Lab.

Nakai・Gotoh Lab.

• Home
• News
• Introduction
• Research
• Member
• Links
• Access

• Introduction:
•  １）
• ２）
• ３）
• ４）
• ５）
• ６）
• ７）
• ８）
• ９）
• 
  

 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 various adsorbents made from thermosensitive polymer gel have been developed. However, they are not suited to practical use because it is difficult to handle them as most of them are used in particulate to improve the rate of adsorption. To make handling these gel type adsorbents easy, it is necessary to compound with a substrate.
    In this research, we compound the polypropylene nonwoven fabrics and the thermosensitive gel by plasma polymerization method. The synthetic condition and adsorption characteristics of them are examined.