Two‐step continuous production of monodisperse colloidal ellipsoids at rates of one gram per day

Abstract

We report a two‐step process for the continuous production of monodisperse polystyrene colloidal ellipsoids of aspect ratios up to 6.8 at rates that exceed 1.0 g per day, an improvement on previously reported synthetic batch processing rates of nearly a factor of 20. This scale up is accomplished by continuous evaporative processing of a polymer solution into an elastomeric film embedded with colloidal spheres. Subsequently, the film is continuously elongated at a temperature that stretches the embedded spheres into ellipsoids. The method is used to deform initially 1.0 μm diameter spheres into ellipsoids of aspect ratio 1.27 ± 0.15, 3.31 ± 0.44, 3.91 ± 0.72, 4.14 ± 0.47, and 6.77 ± 1.01. The particle production rate reported here opens new possibilities for applications of monodisperse ellipsoids, such as self‐assembly and optical characterization of complex crystalline unit cells, as well as rheological characterization of dilute gels and dense suspensions. © 2017 American Institute of Chemical Engineers AIChE J, 64: 697–707, 2018