• Proceedings of the Korean Vacuum Society Conference
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• 2012.02a
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• pp.556-556
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• 2012

Transition metal-based organometallic complexes have shown great talents as a catalyst in various reactions. Designing organic molecules and coordinating them to such active centers have been a promising route to control the catalytic natures. Metallocene, which has transition metal atoms sandwiched by aromatic rings, is one of the representative systems for organometallic catalysts. Group 4-based metallocene catalysts have been most commonly used for the production of polyolefins, which have great world-wide markets in the real life. Graphenes and carbon nanotubes (CNTs) were composed of extended $sp^2$ carbon networks, showing high electron mobility as well as have extremely large steric bulkiness relative to metal centers. We were inspired by these characteristics of such carbon-based nano-materials and assumed that they could intimately interact with active centers of metallocene catalysts. We examined this hypothesis and, recently, reported that CNTs dramatically changed catalytic natures of group 4-based catalysts when they formed hybrid systems with such catalysts. In conclusion, we produced hybrid materials composed of group-4 based metallocenes, $Cp_2ZrCl_2$ and $Cp_2TiCl_2$, and carbon-based nano-materials such as RGO and MWCNT. Such hybrids were generated via simple adsorption between Cp rings of metallocenes and graphitic surfaces of graphene/CNT. The hybrids showed interesting catalytic behaviors for ethylene polymerizations. Resulting PEs had significantly increased Mw relative to those produced from free metallocene-based catalytic systems, which are not adsorbed on carbon-based nano-materials. UHMWPEs with extremely high Mw were obtained at low Tp.

• The Journal of the Korean dental association
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• v.48 no.2
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• pp.106-112
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• 2010

Tissue engineering has been enhanced by advance in biomaterial nature, surface structure and design. In this paper, I report specifically vertically aligned titania ($TiO_2$) nanotube surface structuring for optimization of titanium implants utilizing nanotechnology. The formation, mechanism, characteristics of titania nanotubes are explained and emerging critical role in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine is reviewed. The main focus of this paper is on the unique 3 dimensional tubular shaped nanostructure of titania and its effects on creating epochal impacts on cell behavior. Particularly, I discuss how different cells cultured on titania nanotube are adhered, proliferated, differentiated and showed phenotypic functionality compared to those cultured on flat titanium. As a matter of fact, the presence of titania nanotube surface structuring on titanium for dental applications had an important effect improving the proliferation and mineralization of osteoblasts in vitro, and enhancing the bone bonding strength with rabbit tibia over conventional titanium implants in vivo. The nano-features of titania nanotubular structure are expected to be advantageous in regulating many positive cell and tissue responses for various tissue engineering and regenerative medicine applications.