Abstract
Smart hollow polymeric microspheres have been widely applied in various fields such as controlled release, drug delivery, catalysis, and so on. Herein, a facile, green and one-step template-free method is introduced for preparing pH-responsive hollow polymeric microspheres via gamma irradiation of cyclic ether aqueous solution. The hollow polymeric microspheres are synthesized by radiation-induced polymerization and following the self-assembly and self-organization of amphiphilic polymer with cyclic ethers as monomers in water. SEM, TEM, micro-FTIR, and NMR confirmed the morphology and structures of the resultant microspheres. The confocal laser scanning microscope was used to investigate the stimuli-responsiveness and release behavior of hollow microspheres using 1-pyrene carboxaldehyde as a hydrophobic molecule model. The well-defined hollow polymeric microspheres with an average diameter of ca. 2.6 μm or 1.6 μm were prepared directly from dicyclohexal-18-crown-6 or tetraphydropyrane aqueous solution, respectively. The prepared hollow microspheres exhibit obvious pH stimuli-responsiveness and can release the encapsulated hydrophobic molecules when pH is higher than 5.0. Moreover, the reversible morphology transition between hollow microspheres and micelles makes the prepared hollow polymeric microspheres potentially suitable for a wide range of applications, including removal of dyes, oil field engineering, and biomedical fields.
Highlights
Stimuli-responsive hollow particles, especially hollow micro-sized or nano-sized spheres, continue to attract major interest because they have wide potential applications in fields such as dye precipitation [1], catalysis [2,3], sensors [4,5,6], and especially controlled delivery systems [7,8,9,10]
We reported the construction of well-defined hollow microspheres via a one-step γ-irradiation procedure using simple cyclic ethers without double bonds as monomers in aqueous solution
No other organic or inorganic ship between the yield of hollow microspheres and irradiation time was d templates were used to obtain the hollow structure via this approach
Summary
Stimuli-responsive hollow particles, especially hollow micro-sized or nano-sized spheres, continue to attract major interest because they have wide potential applications in fields such as dye precipitation [1], catalysis [2,3], sensors [4,5,6], and especially controlled delivery systems [7,8,9,10]. Many ‘smart’ hollow polymeric microspheres have been prepared via various methods such as the template method [11], the microencapsulation method [12], and the self-assembly layer-by-layer method [13], which are usually based on pre-prepared stimuli-responsive copolymers. The complicated bottom-up processes and scrupulous core-removing techniques are required [14,15]. All of these would restrict the practical applications of those methods in fabricating ‘smart’ hollow microspheres
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