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The development of pressure ulcers, associated with increased temperature and moisture in specific areas of the body, and the risk of microbial infections in patients lying in a static position for prolonged periods of time represents a serious issue in medicine. In order to prevent the formation of pressure ulcers, this work aims to present advanced nanostructured coatings developed by three research groups. Nanometric silver, ash and functionalized torrefied biomass were the basis for the treatment of wound dressings to improve thermal conductivity and antimicrobial properties of the conventional cotton gauzes. Each treatment was performed according to its own optimized method. The treated fabrics were characterized in terms of antimicrobial properties, heat transfer, morphology and hydrophobic behavior. The results demonstrated the effectiveness of the deposition treatments also in synergistic actions. In particular, the antibacterial efficacy was improved in all the samples by the addition of silver treatment, and the thermal conductivity was enhanced by around 58% with nanometric ashes. A further step of the study involved the designing of two multilayer systems evaluated using circuit models for determining the total thermal conductivity. In this way, both systems were designed with the aim to guarantee simultaneous efficacy: high antibacterial and hydrophilic properties at the skin level and more hydrophobic and conductive behaviors toward the external environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores possible procedures to accelerate CO 2 capture from ambient air by a crystalline alkylamine surfactant (octadecylamine), leading to the corresponding crystalline ammonium-carbamate. Conversion of the amine to the carbamate, in different conditions, is studied by four different techniques: WAXD, FTIR, TGA, and DSC. The WAXD study also gives relevant information on the crystal structures of both amine and derived carbamate. Kinetics of reactions of the crystalline amine are mainly studied by DSC scans, by evaluating melting enthalpies of residual amine. The kinetics of conversion of the amine in ambient CO 2 is strongly accelerated by ball milling with full conversion achieved after only 4 h, while the reaction kinetics of amine powder simply exposed to ambient CO 2 is complete only after nearly 10 3  h. A substantial increase in kinetics of the solid-state amine reaction with ambient CO 2 can be also achieved by increasing the temperature up to 50 °C, i. e. at a temperature slightly lower than amine melting. However, the time for full conversion remains much higher than for room-temperature ball-milled amine (roughly 10 2  h vs 4 h). Hence, suitable ball-milling procedures can lead to complete and relatively fast conversion of the crystalline amine to the crystalline ammonium-carbamate, even with ambient CO 2 ., (© 2024 Wiley-VCH GmbH.)