Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin, F-I2 Soft Matter and Functional Materials, Hahn-Meitner-Platz 1, D-14109 Berlin, Germany.
Macromol Rapid Commun. 2012 Aug 14;33(15):1286-93. doi: 10.1002/marc.201200175. Epub 2012 May 3.
Microgel particles can be fabricated with great control by droplet-based microfluidics; however, to this end, their shape is intrinsically limited to be spherical. Existing approaches to circumvent this limitation rely on the rapid interception of transient non-spherical preparticle shapes, greatly limiting their versatility. This paper presents a facile microfluidic approach that overcomes this limitation. The method utilizes the injection of scaffolding microgel particles into droplets that have insufficient volumes to host the microgels in a spherical shell. As a result, the drops adopt non-spherical equilibrium shapes that serve to template non-spherical soft supraparticles by slow and gentle chemical reactions.
微凝胶颗粒可以通过基于液滴的微流控技术进行精细控制地制备；然而，为此，其形状本质上局限于球形。为了规避这一限制，现有的方法依赖于对瞬态非球形前体形状的快速拦截，这极大地限制了它们的多功能性。本文提出了一种简单的微流控方法来克服这一限制。该方法利用将支架微凝胶颗粒注入体积不足以将微凝胶包裹在球形壳中的液滴中。结果，液滴采用非球形平衡形状，通过缓慢温和的化学反应来模板化非球形软超粒子。
