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Biomimetic approach for liquid encapsulation with nanofibrillar cloaks

journal contribution
posted on 2015-06-10, 16:05 authored by Elisa MeleElisa Mele, Ilker S. Bayer, Gabriele Nanni, Jose A. Heredia-Guerrero, Roberta Ruffilli, Farouk Ayadi, Lara Marini, Roberto Cingolani, Athanassia Athanassiou
Technologies that are able to handle microvolumes of liquids, such as microfluidics and liquid marbles, are attractive for applications that include miniaturized biological and chemical reactors, sensors, microactuators, and drug delivery systems. Inspired from natural fibrous envelopes, here, we present an innovative approach for liquid encapsulation and manipulation using electrospun nanofibers. We demonstrated the realization of non-wetting soft solids consisting of a liquid core wrapped in a hydrophobic fibrillar cloak of a fluoroacrylic copolymer and cellulose acetate. By properly controlling the wetting and mechanical properties of the fibers, we created final architectures with tunable mechanical robustness that were stable on a wide range of substrates (from paper to glass) and floated on liquid surfaces. Remarkably, the realized fiber-coated drops endured vortex mixing in a continuous oil phase at high stirring speed without bursting or water losses, favoring mixing processes inside the entrapped liquid volume. Moreover, the produced cloak can be easily functionalized by incorporating functional particles, active molecules, or drugs inside the nanofibers.

History

School

  • Aeronautical, Automotive, Chemical and Materials Engineering

Department

  • Materials

Published in

LANGMUIR

Volume

30

Issue

10

Pages

2896 - 2902 (7)

Citation

MELE, E. ... et al, 2014. Biomimetic approach for liquid encapsulation with nanofibrillar cloaks. Langmuir, 30 (10), pp. 2896 - 2902.

Publisher

© American Chemical Society

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2014

Notes

This article is closed access.

ISSN

0743-7463

Language

  • en

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