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In an effort to look for correlations between viscosity index trends of polymers in oils and size changes of polymers in solution with temperature, the determination of the size of thermo-responsive polymers of various architectures (linear, comb, star, and hyperbranched) using two experimental techniques – dynamic light scattering and small angle neutron scattering, and predictive molecular dynamics simulations is described herein. The aim of this work was to predict their behavior as viscosity index improvers (VIIs) using these tools which require minimal amounts of material, as opposed to measuring kinematic viscosities, which require multi-gram quantities. Conflicting trends were obtained usingmore » the different aforementioned techniques due to the inherent physics of the measurements. While we provide potential explanations for the trends observed, the focus of this work remains the assessment of any of these techniques as a predictive tool for polymer behavior in an oil matrix. It was concluded that none of the aforementioned techniques can entirely predict the polymer behavior as VIIs, at least in the temperature range studied (40 °C to 100 °C).« less

Lithium-sulfur (Li-S) batteries are regarded as one of the most promising candidates for next generation energy storage systems because of their ultra high theoretical specific energy. To realize the practical application of Li-S batteries, however, a high S active material loading is essential (>70 wt% in the carbon-sulfur (C-S) composite cathode and >2 mg cm-2 in the electrode). A critical challenge to achieving this high capacity in practical electrodes is the dissolution of the longer lithium polysulfide reaction intermediates in the electrolyte (resulting in loss of active material from the cathode and contamination of the anode due to the polysulfidemore » shuttle mechanism). The binder material used for the cathode is therefore crucial as this is a key determinant of the bonding interactions between the active material (S) and electronic conducting support (C), as well as the maintenance of intimate contact between the electrode materials and current collector. The battery performance can thus be directly correlated with the choice of binder, but this has received only minimal attention in the relevant Li-S battery published literature. Here, we investigated the application of polyamidoamine (PAMAM) dendrimers as functional binders in Li-S batteries—a class of materials which has been unexplored for electrode design. By using dendrimers, it is demonstrated that high S loadings (>4 mg cm-2) can be easily achieved using "standard" (not specifically tailored) materials and simple processing methods. An exceptional electrochemical cycling performance was obtained (as compared to cathodes with conventional linear polymeric binders such as carboxymethyl cellulose (CMC) and styrene-butadiene rubber (SBR)) with >100 cycles and 85-98% capacity retention, thus demonstrating the significant utility of this new binder architecture which exhibits critical physicochemical properties and flexible nanoscale design parameters (CNDP's).« less