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Complex architectures formed by alginate drops floating on liquid surfaces
journal contribution
posted on 2015-06-11, 12:37 authored by Elisa MeleElisa Mele, Despina Fragouli, Roberta Ruffilli, Gian Luca De Gregorio, Roberto Cingolani, Athanassia AthanassiouWe demonstrate the generation of natural polymeric structures of complex shapes and controlled composition, starting from the collision of aqueous drops of alginate with the surface of a calcium ion-based liquid. We prove that by tuning the impact velocity of the alginate drops on the target surface one can control the floating state of the drops inducing the formation of mushroom-like structures, upon alginate gelation. Besides the geometric peculiarity, the presented approach allows us to provide dual functionality to the polymeric objects, attaching different kinds of functional molecules onto their surface areas, which are immersed or not in the liquid, making such architectures attractive for the development of a novel class of bionanocomposites.
History
School
- Aeronautical, Automotive, Chemical and Materials Engineering
Department
- Materials
Published in
SOFT MATTERVolume
9Issue
27Pages
6338 - 6343 (6)Citation
MELE, E. ... et al, 2013. Complex architectures formed by alginate drops floating on liquid surfaces. Soft Matter, 9 (27), pp. 6338 - 6343.Publisher
© Royal Society of ChemistryVersion
- 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
2013Notes
This article is closed access.ISSN
1744-683XPublisher version
Language
- en