Kawamoto Takahisa, Minato Haruka, Suzuki Daisuke
Graduate School of Environmental, Life, Natural Science and Technology, Okayama University, 3-1-1 Tsushimanaka, Kita-ku, Okayama, 700-8530, Japan.
Graduate School of Textile Science & Technology, Shinshu University, 3-15-1 Tokida, Ueda, Nagano 386-8567, Japan.
Soft Matter. 2024 Jul 24;20(29):5836-5847. doi: 10.1039/d4sm00640b.
The structures of single microgels and microgel arrays formed at the air/water interface were visualized directly, and their structures correlated with - isotherms in order to understand the compression behavior of soft and deformable microgels at this interface. Large microgels ( 4 μm) were synthesized so that these can be clearly visualized at the air/water interface, even under high compression, and a series of microgel compression experiments were directly evaluated using a Langmuir trough equipped with a fluorescence microscope. The experiments revealed that upon compressing the microgel arrays at the interface voids disappeared and colloidal crystallinity increased. However, the colloidal crystallinity decreased when the microgel arrays were strongly compressed. In addition, when the structures were observed at higher magnification, it became clear that the single microgel structures, when visualized from above, changed from circular to polygonal upon compressing the microgel array. The results of this study can be expected to improve the understanding of the compression behavior of microgel arrays adsorbed at the air/water interface and will thus be useful for the creation of new functional microgel stabilizers with potential applications in , bubbles and emulsions.
直接观察了在空气/水界面形成的单个微凝胶和微凝胶阵列的结构，并将它们的结构与等温线相关联，以了解软质且可变形的微凝胶在此界面处的压缩行为。合成了大型微凝胶（4μm），以便即使在高压缩下也能在空气/水界面清晰地观察到它们，并使用配备荧光显微镜的朗缪尔槽直接评估了一系列微凝胶压缩实验。实验表明，在压缩界面处的微凝胶阵列时，空隙消失且胶体结晶度增加。然而，当微凝胶阵列被强烈压缩时，胶体结晶度降低。此外，当以更高放大倍数观察结构时，很明显从上方观察时，单个微凝胶结构在压缩微凝胶阵列时从圆形变为多边形。预期这项研究的结果将有助于增进对吸附在空气/水界面的微凝胶阵列压缩行为的理解，因此将有助于创建具有潜在应用于泡沫和乳液的新型功能性微凝胶稳定剂。
