Huang Caili, Forth Joe, Wang Weiyu, Hong Kunlun, Smith Gregory S, Helms Brett A, Russell Thomas P
Materials Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, One Cyclotron Road, Berkeley, California 94720, USA.
Polymer Science and Engineering Department, University of Massachusetts, 120 Governors Drive, Conte Center for Polymer Research, Amherst, Massachusetts 01003, USA.
Nat Nanotechnol. 2017 Nov;12(11):1060-1063. doi: 10.1038/nnano.2017.182. Epub 2017 Sep 25.
Bicontinuous jammed emulsions (or bijels) are tortuous, interconnected structures of two immiscible liquids, kinetically trapped by colloidal particles that are irreversibly bound to the oil-water interface. A wealth of applications has been proposed for bijels in catalysis, energy storage and molecular encapsulation, but large domain sizes (on the order of 5 µm or larger) and difficulty in fabrication pose major barriers to their use. Here, we show that bijels with sub-micrometre domains can be formed via homogenization, rather than spinodal decomposition. We achieve this by using nanoparticle surfactants: polymers and nanoparticles of complementary functionality (for example, ion-pairing) that bind to one another at the oil-water interface. This allows the stabilization of the bijel far from the demixing point of the liquids, with interfacial tensions on the order of 20 mN m. Furthermore, our strategy is extremely versatile, as solvent, nanoparticle and ligand can all be varied.
双连续受阻乳液(或双连续胶体乳液)是由两种互不相溶的液体构成的曲折、相互连接的结构,被不可逆地结合在油水界面的胶体颗粒动力学捕获。双连续胶体乳液在催化、能量存储和分子封装等方面有大量应用被提出,但大尺寸区域(约5微米或更大)和制备困难对其应用构成了主要障碍。在此,我们表明通过均化而非旋节线分解可以形成具有亚微米级区域的双连续胶体乳液。我们通过使用纳米颗粒表面活性剂来实现这一点:聚合物和具有互补功能(例如离子配对)的纳米颗粒在油水界面相互结合。这使得双连续胶体乳液在远离液体分相点的情况下得以稳定,界面张力约为20毫牛顿/米。此外,我们的策略极具通用性,因为溶剂、纳米颗粒和配体均可变化。