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Top-down Approach for Fabrication of Polymer Microspheres by Interfacial Engineering

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Abstract

Polymer microspheres with uniform size, composition, and surface property have gained extensive researches in past decades. Conventional bottom-up approaches are using monomers or oligomers to build up desired polymer microspheres. However, directly sha** high-molecular-weight polymers into well-ordered polymer microspheres remains a great challenge. Herein, we reported a facile and efficient top-down approach to fabricate microspheres with high-molecular-weight polymer microfibers. By harnessing interfacial engineering-control during the polymer microspheres formation, uniformly sized microspheres could be produced with widely ranged diameters (from 10 µm to the capillary length of each polymer melt). The size limitation of this approach could be further extended by a controllable Plateau-Rayleigh instability phenomenon. Principally, the top-down approach allows fabrication of microspheres by various polymer melts with surface energy higher than 25 mN/m. Our work paves a way for green, cost-effective, and customizable production of a variety of functional polymer microspheres without any chemical reaction assistant.

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Acknowledgments

This work was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 21603026) and Sichuan Science and Technology Program (No. 2018RZ0115).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Fundamental and Frontier Sciences, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, 610054, China

    Yue Fan, De-Hui Wang, **-Long Yang, Jia-Ning Song, Cheng-Lin Zhang, Jia-** Cui & Xu Deng

  2. Department of Physics at Interfaces, Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research, Ackermannweg 10, 55128, Mainz, Germany

    **ao-Mei Li

  3. School of Optoelectronic Science and Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, 610054, China

    Dong-Sheng Wang

  4. School of Physics, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, 610054, China

    Long-Quan Chen

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  1. Yue Fan
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  2. De-Hui Wang
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  5. **ao-Mei Li
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Correspondence to Dong-Sheng Wang or Xu Deng.

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Fan, Y., Wang, DH., Yang, JL. et al. Top-down Approach for Fabrication of Polymer Microspheres by Interfacial Engineering. Chin J Polym Sci 38, 1286–1293 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10118-020-2453-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10118-020-2453-3

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