Nowadays, finding natural substitutes for mass-produced materials is one of the main tasks faced by scientists and designers. There is an increasing emphasis on the theme of ecology and the need for sustainability. Variants and methods are sought which will create environmentally friendly materials in a fast, relatively inexpensive and ecological way. The aim of this paper is to present different proposals of natural building materials...

The impresive pace of building objects realisation in the 1950s and 1960s was a continuation of the traditional gdynia building pace of the pre-war period. A particular attention and admiration must the reserved for the use at almost every construction site in Gdynia of a considerable quantify of prototypical meterial/construction solutions implemented above all in order to simplify technology and accelerate the pace of building...

Modeling & Simulation (M&S) is used in many different fields and has made many significant contributions. As a field in its own right, there have been many advances in methodologies and technologies. In 2002 a workshop was held in Dagstuhl, Germany, to reflect on the grand challenges facing M&S. Ten years on, a series of M& S Grand Challenge activities are marking a decade of progress and are providing an opportunity to reflect...

Progress in electrochemical technologies, such as automotive batteries, supercapacitors, and fuel cells, depends greatly on developing improved charged interfaces between electrodes and electrolytes. The rational development of such interfaces can benefit from the atomistic understanding of the materials involved by first-principles quantum mechanical simulations with Density Functional Theory (DFT). However, such simulations are...

Poly(2,6-dimethyl-1,4-phenylene oxide) (PPO) and isotactic polypropylene (iPP) are highly incompatible and consequently their uncompatibilized blends are quite brittle regardless of the molecular weights and ductility of the individual components. Isotactic polypropylene-polystyrene block copolymers, to be applied as compatibilizers for a broad range of PPO/iPP blend compositions, were prepared by mechanism transformation from...