We have found that the addition of Cu to an FePt alloy film is an effective approach for reducing the ordering temperature of FePt. The coercivity of the FePtCu film is around 5 kOe after annealing at 300 °C, whereas that of FePt shows several hundred Oe. In the FePtCu film annealed at 700 °C, the coercivity is almost the same as for the FePt films. Therefore, the FePtCu film displays a hard-magnetic property similar to that of the FePt film. The results of x-ray diffraction indicate that a ternary FePtCu alloy is formed. Thus, the formation of the ternary FePtCu alloy is considered to play an important role in reducing the ordering temperature.
Poly(ethylene glycol)-b-poly(d,l-lactide-co-glycolide) (PEG-b-PLGA) diblock copolymers are widely known as polymeric surfactants for biomedical applications, and exhibit high solubility in water compared to PLGA-b-PEG-b-PLGA triblock copolymers known as gelation agents. In order to overcome the difficulties in the preparation of thermo-responsive hydrogels based on PLGA-b-PEG-b-PLGA due to the low solubility in water, the fabrication of thermo-responsive hydrogels based on PEG-b-PLGA with high solubility in water was attempted by adding laponite to the PEG-b-PLGA solution. In detail, PEG-b-PLGA with high solubility in water (i.e., high PEG/PLGA ratio) were synthesized. Then, the nanocomposite solution based on PEG-b-PLGA and laponite (laponite/PEG-b-PLGA nanocomposite) was fabricated by mixing the PEG-b-PLGA solutions and the laponite suspensions. By using the test tube inversion method and dynamic mechanical analysis (DMA), it was found that thermo-responsive hydrogels could be obtained by using PEG-b-PLGA, generally known as polymeric surfactants, and that the gelation temperature was around the physiological temperature and could be regulated by changing the solution composition. Furthermore, from the structural analysis by small angle neutron scattering (SANS), PEG-b-PLGA was confirmed to be on the surface of the laponite platelets, and the thermosensitive PEG-b-PLGA on the laponite surface could trigger the thermo-responsive connection of the preformed laponite network.
Hydrogels made of peptide amphiphiles (PA) have attracted a lot of interest in biomedical fields. Considering the applications of PA hydrogels, the control of the gelation speed and the gel characteristics is essential to predominantly determine the usefulness and practicability of the hydrogels. In this work, the effects of the salt concentrations using sodium dihydrogenorthophosphate (NaH2PO4) on the sol-gel transition behaviors, especially the gelation speed and the gel characteristics of the designed PA (C16-W3K) hydrogels in aqueous solution were discussed. It was found that the original solution state before rheological testing was independent of the salt concentration, which was confirmed by observing the self-assembly structures and the peptide secondary structures of PA through transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and circular dichroism spectroscopy (CD). The PA solutions with different salt concentrations, however, presented a profound difference in the gelation speed and the gel characteristics: the solution exhibited higher gelation speeds and higher mechanical properties at higher salt concentrations. Concurrently, the density, the length of wormlike micelles, and the conformational ratio of β-sheets to α-helices in the equilibrium PA solutions all increased with the increase in the salt concentrations.
Thermoresponsive hydrogels showing biocompatibility and degradability have been under intense investigation for biomedical applications, especially hydrogels composed of hydrophilic poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG) and hydrophobic poly(lactic acid-co-glycolic acid) (PLGA) as first-line materials. Even though various aspects such as gelation behavior, degradation behavior, drug-release behavior, and composition effect have been studied for 20 years since the first report of these hydrogels, there are still many outputs on parameters affecting their gelation, structure, and application. In this review, the current trends of research on linear block copolymers composed of PEG and PLGA during the last 5 years (2014-2019) are summarized. In detail, this review stresses newly found parameters affecting thermoresponsive gelation, findings from structural analysis by simulation, small-angle neutron scattering (SANS), etc., progress in biomedical applications including drug delivery systems and regeneration medicine, and nanocomposites composed of block copolymers with PEG and PLGA and nanomaterials (laponite).
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