The Column - November 2007 - (Page 20)

Meeting Review The Column www.thecolumn.eu.com November 2007 Meeting Review: 12th Desty Memorial Lecture conformed monoliths or powders consisting of microspheres. This year’s Desty Memorial Lecture was held on 19 September at Directional freezing was employed to make 3D porous monolith Staple Inn Hall, London, UK. And, once again the event provided with aligned porosity (in the materials of hydrophilic polymer, a series of excellent lectures put together by organizer Professor hydrophobic polymer, colloids/polymer Peter Myers. composites and inorganic materials) and In his introduction, Peter explained aligned microwires from metal nanoparticles, his ideas for the event had been based inorganic nanoparticles and polymer colloidal on the theme of invention, with suspensions at different length scales of speakers selected for their invention particle sizes. Complex porous structures and innovation. such as biaxially aligned pores and aligned The Chromatographic Society took microspheres supported in the emulsionadvantage of this year’s Desty, which templated polymers were produced by was again sponsored by Waters, to manipulating the technique of directional present the Martin Medal to Johan freezing. Very recently, a novel concept of Roeraade from the Royal Institute of freezing an emulsion was developed to Technology, Stockholm, Sweden. prepare porous microspheres with aligned The main award — the Desty porosity. This method was also Memorial Award — was presented to a demonstrated to be generic in preparing materials scientist who has not porous microsphere with controlled porosity. performed any chromatography. Haifei Other speakers were Jorg Kutter who Zhang’s award lecture showed why his talked about the possibilities and challenges work was being recognized. In thanking of creating “perfect” stationary phases for Haifei, Peter Myers said he was sure that on-chip chromatography. He briefly if Denis had been in the audience Haifei Zhang introduced different ways to realize a listening to the lecture, he would have stationary phase inside a microfluidic started developing some of the ideas channel, such as wall coatings, packed beds, polymer monoliths presented. and microfabricated support structures, and discussed their pros Haifei’s lecture was about inventing novel porous materials for and cons with respect to ease of preparation and performance. potential application in chromatography. Two key techniques Theoretical evidence in the literature favours microfabricated were employed: (1) emulsion templating; (2) directional freezing. support structures with their extremely well defined and Porous materials with highly interconnected hierarchical pores controlled geometries, in particular if they are made available in were produced. The materials prepared include uniform polymer porous form. Jorg then proceeded to show a number of examples beads, silica beads, metal oxide beads, metal (Au, Pd) beads, gold from his laboratory in fabricating both solid and porous support nanoparticles/silica composites. Soluble porous structures were structures in silicon/silica and polymer materials, including produced using the combined technique of emulsion-templating approaches using silicon micrograss and carbon nanotubes. While and freeze templating. Organic nanoparticles suspension was promising excellent performance these structures and materials easily generated by dissolving the porous materials in water. The still pose many challenges that need to be overcome, mainly with materials could be produced in the formats of uniform beads, Author: Peter Myers Email: peter.myers@liverpool.ac.uk 20 http://www.thecolumn.eu.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of The Column - November 2007

The Column - November 2007
Contents
News
Food for Thought Q&A
Zosimus
Market Trends and Analysis
Meeting Review: 12th Desty Memorial Lecture
Separation and Purification of Chiral Compounds by Two-Dimensional Supercritical Fluid Chromatography
Highly Selective Trace Level Extraction using Molecularly Imprinted Polymer Solid-Phase Extraction

The Column - November 2007