New paper in Small

Post date: May 24, 2017 4:29:25 AM

Jing Fan, Shin-Hyun Kim, Zi Chen, Shaobing Zhou, Esther Amstad, Tina Lin, and David A. Weitz, "Creation of faceted polyhedral microgels from compressed emulsions", Small, Accepted for publication (2017) (Fan & Kim contributed equally, Co-corresponding author)

Compressed monodisperse emulsions in confined space exhibit highly ordered structures. We investigate the influence of the volume fraction and the confinement geometry on the organized structures and study the mechanism by which structural transition occurs. Based on the understanding of ordering behavior of compressed emulsions, we develop a simple and high-throughput method to fabricate monodisperse polyhedral microgels using the emulsions as the template. By controlling the geometry of the confined spaces, we implement a variety of shapes such as hexagonal prism, Fejes Toth honeycomb prism, truncated octahedron, pyritohedron, and truncated hexagonal trapezohedron. 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.