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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 AthanassiouTechnologies 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
LANGMUIRVolume
30Issue
10Pages
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 SocietyVersion
- 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
2014Notes
This article is closed access.ISSN
0743-7463Publisher version
Language
- en