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- Creators: School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences
- Creators: Jones, Anne
- Member of: Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection
Targeting Tumors: Inclusion of Functional Groups on Ion-Containing Block Copolymers to Combat Cancer
The honors thesis presented in this document describes an extension to an electrical engineering capstone project whose scope is to develop the receiver electronics for an RF interrogator. The RF interrogator functions by detecting the change in resonant frequency of (i.e, frequency of maximum backscatter from) a target resulting from an environmental input. The general idea of this honors project was to design three frequency selective surfaces that would act as surrogate backscattering or reflecting targets that each contains a distinct frequency response. Using 3-D electromagnetic simulation software, three surrogate targets exhibiting bandpass frequency responses at distinct frequencies were designed and presented in this thesis.
There has been a recent push to examine the materials that nature is able to synthesize and consider whether the materials that humans have invented are geomimetic in nature, and whether designing nature-inspired materials is economically and environmentally beneficial. Mesoporous silica represents a class of materials with pore sizes of 2-50 nm and has been studied in catalysis, separations, and drug delivery. It has generally been made using organosilicon precursors, but in this work, we demonstrate for the first time the successful synthesis of mesoporous silica with uniform mesoporosity of 10 nm using the mineral forsterite (Mg2SiO4) as a silica source, providing a potentially cheaper and more Earth-friendly route to making this technologically important material. Forsterite was synthesized by a solid-state chemistry route and underwent dissolution-reprecipitation in an aqueous acid solution containing the soft template surfactant, Pluronic P123. The formation of forsterite was confirmed with X-ray diffraction (XRD), the successful templating of surfactant was demonstrated with thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) and Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), the surface area was determined through Brunauer-Emmett-Teller (BET) analysis, and pore size and distribution were demonstrated with Barrett-Joyner-Halenda (BJH) analysis. The synthesized mesoporous silica at optimal conditions has surface area of 740 m2/g and pore volume of 1.4 mL/g.