Abstract
Janus particles are of great research interest because of their reduced symmetry, which provides them with unique physical and chemical properties. Such particles can be prepared from spherical structures through colloidal assembly. Whilst colloidal assembly has the potential to be a low cost and scalable process, it typically lacks selectivity. As a consequence, it results in a complex mixture of particles of different architectures, which is tedious to purify. Very recently, we reported the colloidal synthesis of Au semishells, making use of polystyrene–polyphenylsiloxane Janus particles as an intermediate product (Chem. Commun. 2017, 53, 3898–3901). Here, we demonstrate that these Janus particles are realized through colloidal assembly of spherical glucose-functionalized polystyrene particles and an emulsion of phenyltrimethoxysilane in aqueous ammonia, followed by interfacial polycondensation to form the polyphenylsiloxane patch. Both the polystyrene spheres and the emulsion of Ph-TMS in aqueous ammonia are stabilized by a surfmer—a reactive surfactant. The colloidal assembly reported in this manuscript proceeds with an unexpected high selectivity, which makes this process exceptionally interesting for the synthesis of Janus particles. Furthermore, we report insights into the details of the mechanism of formation of these Janus particles, and apply those to adapt the synthesis conditions to produce polystyrene particles selectively decorated with multiple polyphenylsiloxane patches, e.g., raspberry particles.
Highlights
Janus particles have attracted great research interest because of their unique properties that open up possibilities for a large number of applications in various areas such as colloidalPolymers 2017, 9, 475; doi:10.3390/polym9100475 www.mdpi.com/journal/polymersPolymers 2017, 9, 475 chemistry [1,2,3,4,5], physics [1,2,5], medicine [1,2], and biochemistry [1,2]
We performed a series of experiments that provides important insight into the mechanism of formation of polystyrene–polyphenylsiloxane Janus particles
Based on the results from our study on the mechanism, we conclude that the Janus particle involves selective colloidal assembly of an emulsion of Ph-TMS and glucose-functionalized polystyrene formation involves selective colloidal assembly of an emulsion of Ph-TMS and glucose-functionalized particles in aqueous ammonia
Summary
Janus particles have attracted great research interest because of their unique properties that open up possibilities for a large number of applications in various areas such as colloidal. A multitude of synthetic procedures has been reported [8,9] Most of these procedures involve a colloidal assembly [25,26,27], proceed in a confined reactor geometry [2,4,8,28], or require the temporary immobilization of particles on a macroscopic surface [10,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40] to induce the anisotropy. We report important insights into the formation mechanism of the Janus particles consisting of glucose-functionalized polystyrene spheres partly covered with polyphenylsiloxane patches, and apply these insights to selectively produce polystyrene particles with multiple polyphenylsiloxane patches
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