论文部分内容阅读
Microgels are colloidal gel particles with dimension in the range from tens to hundreds of micrometers,which are consisted with crosslinked three-dimensional polymeric network [1].One of the most important characteristic for microgels is their swelling to adsorb and to hold large amounts of aqueous solvent.Microgels have been seen a dramatic rise in drug delivery,cell encapsulation,tissue engineering,bio-sensing,bio-imaging,separation and micro-synthesis.Traditionally,microgels are prepares with high-shear techniques such as precipitation,spray-drying and phase separation.Microgels produced from these techniques have large size dispersity,high variability of uncontrollable structures and limited encapsulation efficiency [2].Recently,the droplet-based microfluidic technology offered a method to shape and assemble the microgels through physical shear forces without relying on chemical synthesis,which largely widen the application of microgels in biomedical fields.Droplet-based microfluidic is an effective,versatile and scalable approach to produce microgels with desirable features.The high degree of control endowed with microfluidic enables the formation of various functional microgels such as multi-compartment microgels,Janus-shaped microgels and non-spherical microgels.One of the most attractive features of these microgels prepared from droplet microfluidic is their monodispersity in size and shape [3].Droplet microfluidic production of microgels broadly consists of two steps,formation of pre-gel droplets via emulsifying pre-gels phase with oil phase and inducing solidification of the pre-gel droplets via chemical or physical gelation methods.In this study,poly (ethylene glycol) diacrylate (PEG-DA) and thermo-responsive microgels poly (N-isopropylacrylamide) (pNIPAm) are formed using cross-flow droplet microfluidic device.Results indicated the well-controlled size distribution and temperature response.