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

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 shaping 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.