🚨Last call🚨 for oral abstracts to present at the coming #UKPorMat conference in Bristol in June! Deadline is tomorrow, send us one if you work on anything porous!
We look forward to seeing you in Bristol in June ☀️
Visit www.ukpormat.com for info and details.
By popular demand, abstract submission deadlines have been extended - send us your porous materials abstracts, and come visit us in Bristol this June! Details at ukpormat.com @rsc-pormat.bsky.social
We welcome contributions from researchers at any career stage, reporting research on any type of porous materials without fear or favour!🧽
To see the fabulous lineup of invited speakers and information for abstract submission and registration, go to www.ukpormat.com
#UKPorMat2026 #PorousMaterials
📢 Just a few days left to send your oral abstracts for #UKPorMat2026, deadline on the 31st January 📢
With Sanjit Nayak we are looking forward to welcoming you in the beautiful city of Bristol 🌉 on the 9-10th June 2026 for what promises to be another excellent and fun porous materials conference.
The fibres are "immersed" in a polymer matrix and the cracks typically appear at the polymer/fibre interface. I'm endlessly fascinated by the ability we have to see matter evolving at such a small scale - truly a microscopy tour de force.
And this shows one of the timelapse images from the paper - can you see the tiny cracks forming as the temperature goes down? The circles on the image are cross-sections of carbon fibres, of diameter of around 5 micrometers - that's smaller than human hairs!
The work was led by Prof. Ian Hamerton in collaboration with Dr Ram Ramakrishnan and collaborators at Bristol, at
@imperialcollegeldn.bsky.social, and with the National Composites Centre.
Here @bristoluni.bsky.social and Bristol Composites Institute PhD student James Griffith developed an imaging method based on cryo-scanning electron microscopy, to watch these cracks form in real time as the composite was cooled.
Understanding how and why tiny cracks form in composite materials will help engineers improve cryogenic composite designs—making them safer and more reliable for future applications in cold environments, such as in the growing fields of sustainable aviation and hydrogen storage.
I'm very happy to have been part of this project now published in 'Investigating the microcracking behaviour of a commercial epoxy matrix under cryogenic conditions' in Composites Part A: Applied Science and Manufacturing (tinyurl.com/3e29wxde).
I’m attending an important meeting on student support but really distracted by the presence in the room of this giant horn (is that even how it’s called?). #schoolofmusic
I keep seeing announcements about a new season of Handmaid’s Tale coming up and I can’t figure out if it’s true or about the current political 💩storm.
(5/5) Finally I also wanted to acknowledge the three very thorough (😬) reviewers who examined our work along multiple cycles of peer-review. They gave us a bit of a hard time, but they pushed us to significantly improve our work along the way, and we are grateful for that.
#chemsky
(4/5) This work opens the way to using the optical properties of "polymers of intrinsic microporosity" (PIMs) which have been overlooked so far; PIMs are well used in gas separation or water purification, but much less in light harvesting. We hope to report more exciting work in the coming months!
(3/5) The journey was not always straight (pesky pandemic delayed our progress significantly) but I am very happy to see this work published with her as lead author, and with excellent collaborators at @imperialcollegeldn.bsky.social (Meihuizi Jiang and Saif Haque).
(2/5) Yuxing (Stella) Wang apparently enjoyed her project as she successfully applied to a Scholarship to pursue PhD studies on the same topic. She became the first PhD student in my group and has been its cornerstone since then. ⭐
(1/5) I am very proud of this paper, about one of the first projects I started when I joined @bristoluni.bsky.social. At the time I asked an (unsuspecting) undergraduate student to study the optical properties of PIMs for her final year project.
advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
Oh and you also had to kneel under the probe to tune it, being careful not to trip in the cables or to hit your head against the instrument in the process 🥲
What better way to start then to highlight good news. May I introduce Dr. Justin Park, Ph.D. Defended his co-toutelle thesis with @sebrochat.bsky.social (BristolU) and Pierangelo Gobbo (UTrieste).
I’m still not sure about leaving Twitter completely as that would be a (small, obviously) win for the mob and Musk who slowly but surely silence evidence-based information and folks who are not aligned with their Handsmaid’s Tale views - but on the other hand 🤷♂️
So I took the plunge and created an account here… great to see folks I used to see on that other place, who went silent in the last couple of months! Hope for more interesting convos and fewer bots/conspiracies/crypto madness.
I was wondering too! First thing I've learned on Bluesky since joining yesterday!
