An easily assembled double T-shape for the preparation of submillimeter-sized hollow polyacrylonitrile (PAN) microcapsules for inertial confinement fusion (ICF) project

Abstract

An off-the-shelf device combined with commercial double T-shape adapters that performs as a micro double emulsion generator was presented in this paper. The advantage of this device lies in that it is assembled very conveniently and the channel needn’t any modification to produce O/W/O double emulsion droplets. High-quality hollow PAN microcapsules were fabricated for the purpose of ICF program through the device. Density-matched three-phase solutions were confected to form stable double emulsions. Initial eccentric double emulsions were able to adjust to be concentric during the process of flowing from the tube to the collection cylinder or self-adjustment during rotary evaporation. When the parameters of three-phase solutions and the tube's diameter were fixed, sizes of the emulsions were mainly related with the flowing velocities of the three-phase solutions. Solidification parameters were optimized to gain high-quality microcapsules. Finally, inner solvent was eliminated with supercritical drying method and the solvent-free targets were obtained. The obtained high-quality hollow microcapsules will have potential application in the ICF program in the future.