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Semipermeable elastic microcapsules for gas capture and sensing

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journal contribution
posted on 2016-09-27, 13:03 authored by Ali Nabavi, Goran VladisavljevicGoran Vladisavljevic, Sai Gu, Vasilije Manovic
Monodispersed microcapsules for gas capture and sensing were developed consisting of elastic semipermeable polymer shells of tuneable size and thickness and pH-sensitive, gas selective liquid cores. The microcapsules were produced using glass capillary microfluidics and continuous on-the-fly photopolymerisation. The inner fluid was 5-30 wt% K2CO3 solution with m-cresol purple, the middle fluid was a UV-curable liquid silicon rubber containing 0-2 wt% Dow Corning® 749 fluid, and the outer fluid was aqueous solution containing 60-70 wt% glycerol and 0.5-2 wt% stabiliser (polyvinyl alcohol, Tween 20 or Pluronic® F-127). An analytical model was developed and validated for prediction of the morphology of the capsules under osmotic stress based on the shell properties and the osmolarity of the storage and core solutions. The minimum energy density and UV light irradiance needed to achieve complete shell polymerisation were 2 J∙cm-2 and 13.8 mW·cm-2, respectively. After UV exposure, the curing time for capsules containing 0.5 wt% Dow Corning® 749 fluid in the middle phase was 30-40 min. The CO2 capture capacity of 30 wt% K2CO3 capsules was 1.6-2 mmol/g depending on the capsule size and shell thickness. A cavitation bubble was observed in the core when the internal water was abruptly removed by capillary suction, whereas a gradual evaporation of internal water led to buckling of the shell. The shell was characterised using TGA, DSC, and FTIR. The shell degradation temperature was 450-460°C.

Funding

This work received financial support from the EPSRC grant EP/HO29923/1.

History

School

  • Aeronautical, Automotive, Chemical and Materials Engineering

Department

  • Chemical Engineering

Published in

Langmuir: the ACS journal of surfaces and colloids

Volume

32

Issue

38

Pages

9826 - 9835

Citation

NABAVI, S.A., 2016. Semipermeable elastic microcapsules for gas capture and sensing. Langmuir, 32(38), pp 9826–9835.

Publisher

© American Chemical Society

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

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/

Acceptance date

2016-09-03

Publication date

2016-09-03

Notes

The videos accompanying the paper are contained beneath the publishers URL. This document is the Accepted Manuscript version of a Published Work that appeared in final form in Langmuir, copyright © American Chemical Society after peer review and technical editing by the publisher. To access the final edited and published work see https://dx.doi.org/10.1021/acs.langmuir.6b02420.s002.

ISSN

1520-5827

Language

  • en