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Non‐Spherical Soft Supraparticles from Microgel Building Blocks
Author(s) -
Seiffert Sebastian
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
macromolecular rapid communications
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.348
H-Index - 154
eISSN - 1521-3927
pISSN - 1022-1336
DOI - 10.1002/marc.201200175
Subject(s) - microfluidics , nanotechnology , materials science , spherical shell , limiting , shell (structure) , composite material , mechanical engineering , engineering
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.