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Between Solid-State NMR and Nanoscience—a Long Journey with Great Perspectives: A Themed Issue in Honor of Professor Jacek Klinowski

A special issue of Molecules (ISSN 1420-3049). This special issue belongs to the section "Physical Chemistry".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 September 2025 | Viewed by 831

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
Faculty of Chemical and Process Engineering, Warsaw University of Technology, Warsaw, Poland
Interests: nanotechnology; carbon; carbon nanomaterials synthesis; materials science; spectroscopy

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Jacek Klinowski, a scientist working in solid-state NMR and nanotechnology, is well known for being the co-author of the Lerf–Klinowski model of graphite oxide, a precursor to graphene which predates the Nobel Prize awarded to André Geim and Konstantin Novoselov for their discovery of graphene in 2010.

Born in Kraków, Poland, on 11 October 1943, Jacek Klinowski has since obtained Ph.D. degrees from the Jagiellonian University and from the University of London, and an M.A. and Sc.D. from the University of Cambridge, where he is now Emeritus Professor of Chemical Physics. Between 1968 and 1979 he worked at Imperial College London on isomorphous replacements in aluminosilicates. In 1980, he moved to Cambridge to work on the solid-state NMR of molecular sieves. He first learned of this technique while working in Professor C.A. Fyfe’s laboratory and then refined it at the University of Guelph, Canada. His early work was on 29Si and 27Al. Papers on the ordering of aluminum and silicon in zeolitic frameworks, the dealumination of zeolites, the relationship between chemical shifts and structure, and ultrastabilization have appeared in Nature and other leading journals and are now citation classics.

His interests include nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, particularly of inorganic solids such as zeolite catalysts and other molecular sieves, layered materials, fullerenes, and ceramics. He is also involved in research on the geometric reasons behind the chemical activity of solids and the rules governing the relationship between local order and physical properties, using mathematical techniques and computer visualization to achieve these goals. The key concept here is that of periodic minimal curvature.

Jacek Klinowski has 502 publications to his name and is the co-author, with J.W. Hennel, of the Fundamentals of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (Longman, 1993) and the Primer of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (Imperial College Press, 1998). He was also the Editor-in-Chief of Solid-State Nuclear Magnetic Resonance for 20 years. He is a Foreign Member of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences; an Honorary Member of the Polish Chemical Society, and a holder of the Society’s Marie Curie Medal; Honorary Professor of Jagiellonian University; Doctor Honoris Causa of the University of Warsaw; and a Visiting Professor at the universities of Poznań (Poland), Aveiro (Portugal), and Cagliari (Italy).

Dr. Leszek Stobinski
Prof. Dr. Teobald Kupka
Guest Editors

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Keywords

  • solid-state NMR
  • NMR
  • zeolites
  • ordered carbon nanostructures
  • MOFs
  • mathematics in crystallography

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

17 pages, 2564 KiB  
Article
Comparative Analysis of Amorphous and Biodegradable Copolymers: A Molecular Dynamics Study Using a Multi-Technique Approach
by Alovidin Nazirov, Jacek Klinowski and John Nobleman
Molecules 2025, 30(5), 1175; https://doi.org/10.3390/molecules30051175 - 6 Mar 2025
Viewed by 582
Abstract
We investigate the molecular dynamics of glycolide/lactide/caprolactone (Gly/Lac/Cap) copolymers using differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), 1H second-moment, 1H spin-lattice relaxation time (T1) analysis, and 13C solid-state NMR over a temperature range of 100–413 K. [...] Read more.
We investigate the molecular dynamics of glycolide/lactide/caprolactone (Gly/Lac/Cap) copolymers using differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), 1H second-moment, 1H spin-lattice relaxation time (T1) analysis, and 13C solid-state NMR over a temperature range of 100–413 K. Activation energies and correlation times of the biopolymer chains were determined. At low temperatures, relaxation is governed by the anisotropic threefold reorientation of methyl (-CH3) groups in lactide. A notable change in T1 at ~270 K and 294 K suggests a transition in amorphous phase mobility due to translational diffusion, while a second relaxation minimum (222–312 K) is linked to CH2 group dynamics influenced by caprolactone. The activation energy increases from 5.9 kJ/mol (methyl motion) to 22–33 kJ/mol (segmental motion) as the caprolactone content rises, enhancing the molecular mobility. Conversely, lactide restricts motion by limiting rotational freedom, thereby slowing global dynamics. DSC confirms that increasing ε-caprolactone lowers the glass transition temperature, whereas higher glycolide and lactide content raises it. The onset temperature of main-chain molecular motion varies with the composition, with greater ε-caprolactone content enhancing flexibility. These findings highlight the role of composition in tuning relaxation behavior and molecular mobility in copolymers. Full article
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