Britton Chance Center for Biomedical Photonics at Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics-Hubei Bioinformatics & Molecular Imaging Key Laboratory, Systems Biology Theme Department of Biomedical Engineering, College of Life Science and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, P. R. China.
Nanoscale. 2019 Mar 7;11(10):4562-4570. doi: 10.1039/c8nr09229j.
Self-propelled micro/nanomotors play a crucial role in the fields of biomedicine, energy and the environment but are limited by low throughput and a tedious fabrication approach. Here, we propose a simple microfluidics-based scheme for fabricating substrate-free graphene oxide (GO)-based micromotors of different shapes and sizes with high throughput. The micromotors are designed to possess a 'Janus'-like porous structure, and half of each micromotor is modified with hierarchical Pt nanoflowers, which can promote the wetting of Pt with an H2O2 solution and result in a high speed of movement. To investigate the applicability of the micromotors, they were employed to rapidly remove an antibiotic, namely, tetracycline, from a solution. It was found that the rapid movement of the micromotors increased the mass transfer of tetracycline and the frequency of collisions between tetracycline molecules and the micromotors, which led to a high removal efficiency. The direction of movement of the micromotors can be conveniently controlled by an external magnetic field. Furthermore, the removal efficiency and removal time as functions of the number of micromotors, the adsorption kinetics and adsorption isotherm, and the removal amount as a function of the pH were investigated. This proved that the micromotors that were constructed exhibit high adsorption capabilities for tetracycline and implied that they hold great promise for the removal of antibiotics with similar structures or other pollutants, including organic compounds, heavy metals and oil droplets.
自推进微/纳米马达在生物医学、能源和环境等领域发挥着关键作用，但受到低通量和繁琐制造方法的限制。在这里，我们提出了一种简单的基于微流控的方案，用于制造具有高通量的不同形状和尺寸的无基底氧化石墨烯（GO）基微马达。这些微马达被设计成具有“类 Janus”的多孔结构，并且每个微马达的一半用分级 Pt 纳米花进行修饰，这可以促进 Pt 与 H2O2 溶液的润湿，并导致高速运动。为了研究微马达的适用性，我们将其用于快速去除溶液中的抗生素，即四环素。结果发现，微马达的快速运动增加了四环素的传质和四环素分子与微马达之间的碰撞频率，从而导致了高去除效率。微马达的运动方向可以通过外部磁场方便地控制。此外，还研究了微马达数量、吸附动力学和吸附等温线对去除效率和去除时间的影响，以及 pH 值对去除量的影响。这证明了所构建的微马达对四环素具有很高的吸附能力，并暗示它们在去除具有类似结构的抗生素或其他污染物方面具有很大的潜力，包括有机化合物、重金属和油滴。
