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 polymer particle of mm order is used widely as a carrier of the catalyst and a substrate of functional polymer. However, the uniform sized particles were hardly obtained with a conventional manufacturing method (suspension polymerization method).
    In this research, we investigate the method of synthesizing the single dispersed polymer particle of mm order efficiently that is called sedimentation polymerization method. In addition, we research the method of synthesizing the particles of which internal structure is inhomogeneous such as hollow particles or porous particles by controlling the synthesis conditions, too.