Rukmava’s paper in Advanced Materials is now online!!!

Kudos to Rukmava Chatterjee who worked tirelessly over two years in difficult Covid conditions towards this work...

●Link to paper: https://lnkd.in/g8CKaEd7
●US patent: https://lnkd.in/gTXGPz3Y

The nascent idea of this work started with a simple question: Can we slow down the dissolution of cryoprotectants that are widely used for anti-icing applications? As a first step, we wondered if an ice-like material (solidified DMSO) that is superhydrophilic could be tricked into turning hydrophobic... We thought since surfactants can self-assemble at the interface of polar liquids and air (with hydrophobic groups directed outwards), by freezing such structure, we could probably lock it and turn it into a partially phobic material... And it worked! and also led to marked improvements in the performance of the native material (all discussed in the paper)... Then, we wondered whether adding another PCM makes it even better! Getting some inspiration from history to make such unconventional combinations, we ended up making a library of emulsions and creams with really interesting properties...
Still, to make things even better, we plotted to encapsulate the cryoprotectant in gels, and ended up getting even better multifunctional performance :)

More on all the above in the paper...