Double UV lights intersection shaping for bowl-shaped ceramic microparticles based on microfluidics

Abstract

Anisotropic ceramic microparticles have been extensively studied in various fields such as mechanical transmission, wave absorbing, structural materials, and abrasives owing to their remarkable properties. The shape of the microparticles plays an important role in their functions. Here, we presented a facile and tunable microfluidic approach to fabricate the ceramic microparticles (∼370 μm in diameter) with the bowl shape, which have been quite challenging for synthesizing to date. Double UV lights were applied to shape the microparticles. By tailoring the cross angle and the intensities of both UV lights, bowl-shaped ceramic microparticles with different opening sizes (0–340 μm) and hollow spherical ceramic microparticles with different-sized through-holes (f = 0–0.265) were fabricated. These obtained ceramic microparticles hold great potentials to be used as the micro-components in sewage filters, micro ball valves, MEMS, micro-robots, and so forth.