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Showing posts from April, 2015

Palytoxin

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According to an ancient legend from Hawaii, on the Island of Maui there was a village of fishermen near the harbour of Hana which was haunted by a curse. One day, when the fishermen returned from the sea, one of the fishermen were missing. On the next day, another loss of fisherman caused the other fishermen assaulted a hunchbacked hermit deemed culprit of the village's misery. While ripping off the hermit's cloak, the villagers were shocked because they found rows a sharp and triangular teeth within a huge jaw. They had caught a shark god. It was clearly that the missing men was eaten by the shark god and the men mercilessly tore the shark god into pieces, burned him, and threw the ashes into a tide pool. Then, a thick brown moss started to grow one the pool's wall which caused an instant death to the victims hit by spear smeared by that moss. Thus, this moss was known  as limu-make-o-hana which means seaweed of death from Hana. From this legend, it turns out that limu-ma

Physical Forms of Polymerisation

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After discussing the chemical forms of polymerisation such as step and chain polymerisations, this section will discuss the physical forms of polymerisation. In general, there are 6 physical forms of polymerisation which monomers can be polymerised. In some cases, the polymerisations have a better size control which makes it attractive for industry.

Ziegler-Natta Polymerisation

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This time, we will see another method of polymerisation which use transition metal complex chemistry in the process. This polymerisation is called Ziegler-Natta (ZN) polymerisation and it is named after German chemist Karl Ziegler and Italian chemist Giulio Natta who developed this polymerisation initially. Ziegler and Natta were awarded 1963 Nobel Prize in chemistry. K. Ziegler (left) and G. Natta (right)

Anionic and Cationic Polymerisations

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The other types of chain polymerisations, besides free radical polymerisations, are anionic and cationic polymerisation. In this case, the active side is anionic or cationic polymerisation. This section, we will discuss anionic polymerisation then followed by cationic polymerisation.