Using the Quartz Crystal Microbalance to Monitor the Curing of Drying Oils.

Drying oils such as linseed oil form a polymer network through a complex free-radical polymerization process. We have studied polymerization in this challenging class of polymers using a quartz crystal microbalance (QCM). The QCM is able to measure the evolution of polymer mass and mechanical properties as the oil transitions from a liquid-like to a solid-like state. Measurements using bulk materials and thin films provide information about the initial polymerization phase as well as the evolution of the mass and mechanical properties over the first two years of cure. The temperature-dependent response of the cured linseed oil films was also measured. These results were combined with previously published results obtained from traditional dynamic mechanical analysis to give a unified picture of the properties of these materials across a very broad temperature range.

Sample Preparation in Quartz Crystal Microbalance Measurements of Protein Adsorption and Polymer Mechanics.

In this study, we present various examples of how thin film preparation for quartz crystal microbalance experiments informs the appropriate modeling of the data and determines which properties of the film can be quantified. The quartz crystal microbalance offers a uniquely sensitive platform for measuring fine changes in mass and/or mechanical properties of an applied film by observing the changes in mechanical resonance of a quartz crystal oscillating at high frequency. The advantages of this approach include its experimental versatility, ability to study changes in properties over a wide range of experimental time lengths, and the use of small sample sizes. We demonstrate that, based on the thickness and shear modulus of the layer deposited on the sensor, we can acquire different information from the material. Here, this concept is specifically exploited to display experimental parameters resulting in mass and viscoelastic calculations of adsorbed collagen on gold and polyelectrolyte complexes during swelling as a function of salt concentration.

Spin-Forbidden Transitions between Electronic States in the Active Site of Rubredoxin.

Rubredoxin is a small iron-sulfur protein involved in biological electron transfer, which is accomplished by changing the oxidation state of the iron atom in the active site. We investigate the possibility of spin-forbidden transitions between the lowest energy electronic states with different spin multiplicities in the rubredoxin active site models [Fe(SCH3)4]n (n = 2-, 1-, 0) using nonadiabatic transition state theory (NA-TST). The equilibrium structures, minimum energy crossing point structures and Hessians were obtained with density functional theory. The spin-orbit coupling (SOC) was calculated with the complete active space configuration interaction method using the two-electron spin-orbit Breit-Pauli Hamiltonian. We found several crossings between the lowest energy spin states associated with the changes in Fe coordination. However, only triplet/quintet crossings in [Fe(SCH3)4]2- and [Fe(SCH3)4]0, as well as a quartet/sextet crossing in [Fe(SCH3)4]- are characterized by nonzero first-order SOC responsible for transitions between these spin states. The rates of spin-forbidden transitions in the [Fe(SCH3)4]2- complex are 1 and 2 orders of magnitude higher than the rates in the [Fe(SCH3)4]- and [Fe(SCH3)4]0 complexes, respectively. These rate differences are related to a large variation of the SOC between the complexes with different charges, which in turn comes from different molecular orbitals involved in the spin-flip transitions. Finally, we demonstrate that the differences between the NA-TST rates and the rates calculated under the assumption of completely spin-allowed transitions could be as large as 4 orders of magnitude. This means that even in qualitative discussions of the reaction mechanisms involving changes in spin states the partially spin-forbidden nature of the transitions between these states must be taken into account.