What is this site?
This site is dedicated to my work-related weblog. In the weblog you will find discussions about articles of interest to my research topic, to which I will gladly receive comments. The topic is the Ph.D. research I’m currently engaged in.

What is it all about?
High-performance fibres such as Twaron® and Kevlar®, have severely impacted the fibre market with their versatility and unparalleled performance since their appearance 30-odd years ago. Such fibres have also captured the interest of many researchers, and many aspects of the fibres have been investigated. However, whilst individual techniques have been applied to characterise the microstructure, no concatenation and comparison of these results has been published.

The aim of this project is to provide an uncompromising and authoritative methodology to the determination of the microstructure of high-performance polymer materials. For this, many techniques (e.g. light scattering, (electron) microscopy and nitrogen absorption) will be applied, in order to verify, support and complement a complete view of the microstructure of such high-performance fibres.

Small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) will play a central role in these investigations. This technique excels for its lack of requirements for the sample and the validity of the data over the entire irradiated area.

SAXS has been extensively applied in the past to investigate the microfibrillar and micropore structure of many types of fibres. However, these techniques required many assumptions in order to simplify and linearise the data to make it suitable for parameter extraction. Thus, the methods developed in the past will benefit from revisions, to make them more suitable for the analysis of fibres.

What is the title about?
The title is about the interest in pores, essentially, nothing. A vacuum.

When is the next update?
I will aim for a comfortable bi-monthly update schedule, but more often happens.

Copyright notice
Everything on this site unless otherwise stated is published under a Non-Commercial Creative Commons 2.5 license. (copyright Brian R. Pauw, 2007)