The last October was very busy for the meetings. After the computational polymer meeting, I was invited to the soft-matter meeting in Hokkaido, and then I flew to Kyusyu to attend the international rubber meeting. Then I went to the rheology meeting in Osaka. The weather was quite fluctuating and I got a cold. The graduate students were also busy to participate the student workshop which was the day before the rheology meeting, and then they went to the main meeting.
The great news for our group is that Mr Hirayama have been awarded the best poster award in the rheology meeting. His presentation was on the solidification of Nylons measured via rheology. The interesting result in his research is that the solidification occurs even with a negligible amount of crystallinity. This result is something out of conventional view of polymer rheology in which the main mechanism of solidification is presumed as crystallization (for the case of crystalline polymers). His experiments for a set of different Nylons hint a role of hydrogen bonding. These results attracted the attention of attendees who gave us some useful suggestions.
I should mention that I have received many positive feedbacks from the attendees for the other posters made by Mr Isoda and Mr Takata as well. Their activities are actually very nice. We would expect further achievements.