Small
Small
5 years ago

Creation of Faceted Polyhedral Microgels from Compressed Emulsions

Creation of Faceted Polyhedral Microgels from Compressed Emulsions
Shaobing Zhou, Shin-Hyun Kim, David A. Weitz, Esther Amstad, Jing Fan, Zi Chen, Tina Lin
Compressed monodisperse emulsions in confined space exhibit highly ordered structures. The influence of the volume fraction and the confinement geometry on the organized structures is investigated and the mechanism by which structural transition occurs is studied. Based on the understanding of ordering behavior of compressed emulsions, a simple and high-throughput method to fabricate monodisperse polyhedral microgels using the emulsions as the template is developed. By controlling the geometry of the confined spaces, a variety of shapes such as hexagonal prism, Fejes Toth honeycomb prism, truncated octahedron, pyritohedron, and truncated hexagonal trapezohedron are implemented. Moreover, the edge sharpness of each shape is controllable by adjusting the drop volume fraction. This design principle can be readily extended to other shapes and materials, and therefore provides a useful means to create polyhedral microparticles for both fundamental study and practical applications. Inspired by dispersion systems of two immiscible fluids, a simple and high-throughput method to create microgels with a variety of polyhedral shapes from monodisperse compressed emulsions is developed. To better understand the ordering behavior of compressed emulsions, the influence of the volume fraction of the drops and the geometry of the confinement on the organized structures is investigated and the mechanism by which structural transition occurs is studied.

Publisher URL: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi

DOI: 10.1002/smll.201701256

You might also like
Discover & Discuss Important Research

Keeping up-to-date with research can feel impossible, with papers being published faster than you'll ever be able to read them. That's where Researcher comes in: we're simplifying discovery and making important discussions happen. With over 19,000 sources, including peer-reviewed journals, preprints, blogs, universities, podcasts and Live events across 10 research areas, you'll never miss what's important to you. It's like social media, but better. Oh, and we should mention - it's free.

  • Download from Google Play
  • Download from App Store
  • Download from AppInChina

Researcher displays publicly available abstracts and doesn’t host any full article content. If the content is open access, we will direct clicks from the abstracts to the publisher website and display the PDF copy on our platform. Clicks to view the full text will be directed to the publisher website, where only users with subscriptions or access through their institution are able to view the full article.