Creation of Faceted Polyhedral Microgels from Compressed Emulsions |
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| Authors: | Jing Fan Shin‐Hyun Kim Zi Chen Shaobing Zhou Esther Amstad Tina Lin David A Weitz |
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| Affiliation: | 1. Department of Mechanical Engineering, The City College of New York, New York, NY, USA;2. Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, KAIST, Daejeon, Republic of Korea;3. Thayer School of Engineering, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA;4. School of Materials Science and Engineering, Key Laboratory of Advanced Technologies of Materials, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu, Sichuan, China;5. EPFL‐STI‐IMX‐SMAL, Lausanne, Switzerland;6. Department of Physics and School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA |
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| Abstract: | Compressed monodisperse emulsions in confined space exhibit highly ordered structures. The influence of the volume fraction and the confinement geometry on the organized structures is investigated and the mechanism by which structural transition occurs is studied. Based on the understanding of ordering behavior of compressed emulsions, a simple and high‐throughput method to fabricate monodisperse polyhedral microgels using the emulsions as the template is developed. By controlling the geometry of the confined spaces, a variety of shapes such as hexagonal prism, Fejes Toth honeycomb prism, truncated octahedron, pyritohedron, and truncated hexagonal trapezohedron are implemented. Moreover, the edge sharpness of each shape is controllable by adjusting the drop volume fraction. This design principle can be readily extended to other shapes and materials, and therefore provides a useful means to create polyhedral microparticles for both fundamental study and practical applications. |
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| Keywords: | emulsions hydrogel packing structure microgels nonspherical particles |
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