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Facile production of biodegradable bipolymer patchy and patchy Janus particles with controlled morphology by microfluidic routes
journal contribution
posted on 2017-08-17, 13:11 authored by Ekanem E. Ekanem, Zilin Zhang, Goran VladisavljevicGoran VladisavljevicPatchy and patchy Janus particles composed of
poly(DL-lactic acid) (PLA) and polycaprolactone (PCL)
regions were produced with a controlled size, patchiness,
composition, and shape anisotropy by microfluidic emulsification
and solvent evaporation. Isotropic particles composed of
PCL patches embedded in the PLA matrix were produced
from relatively small drops with a diameter of 14−25 μm
because of the fast solvent extraction as a result of high
interfacial area of the particles. Anisotropic patchy Janus
particles were formed from large drops, 100−250 μm in
diameter. A higher degree of polymer separation was achieved
using a higher ratio of dichloromethane to ethyl acetate in the
organic phase because of the more pronounced patch
coarsening via Ostwald ripening. Janus particles with two fully separated polymer compartments were produced by in situ
microfluidic mixing of two separate polymer streams within the formed droplets. The advantage of in situ micromixing is that the
particle morphology can be changed continuously in a facile manner during drop generation by manipulating the organic stream
flow rates. PCL and PLA domains within the particles were visualized by confocal laser scanning microscopy because of the
preferential adsorption of rhodamine 6G dye onto PLA domains and higher binding affinity of Nile red toward PCL.
Funding
E.E.E. holds a scholarship from Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC), Nigeria. The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support from the EPSRC grant EP/HO29923/1.
History
School
- Aeronautical, Automotive, Chemical and Materials Engineering
Department
- Chemical Engineering
Published in
LangmuirCitation
EKANEM, E.E., ZHANG, Z. and VLADISAVLJEVIC, G.T., 2017. Facile production of biodegradable bipolymer patchy and patchy Janus particles with controlled morphology by microfluidic routes. Langmuir, 33(34), pp. 8476–8482.Publisher
American Chemical SocietyVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/Acceptance date
2017-08-04Publication date
2017-08-04Notes
This is an Open Access article published by ACS and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence (CC BY 4.0), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ISSN
0743-7463Publisher version
Language
- en