Concentration Of Colloidal Suspension Research Articles

Optimizing the concentration of colloidal suspensions in convective assembly of centimeter-sized uniform monolayer colloidal crystals

In this paper, it is shown that the concentration of the colloidal suspension has a significant role in the assembly of a uniform centimeter-sized monolayer colloidal crystal (MCC) and the optimized range of the concentrations for fabricating MCCs made of polystyrene (PS) microspheres with the diameter of 508nm is obtained. The gravity assisted convective assembly method is used to fabricate MCCs. It has been shown that not only the size of the MCC but also its uniformity and quality is highly dependent on the concentration of the colloidal suspension. Having used different methods to analyze the samples such as taking the transmission spectra, optical microscopy imaging, scanning electron microscopy (SEM) imaging, and studying the diffraction patterns of the samples, it is deduced that the optimized range of the concentration is from 1.7wt% to 1.85wt%.

Fabrication of Colloidal Crystals on Different Patterned Silicon Substrates by Self-Assembly Method

Silica and polystyrene (PS) microspheres assembled on two quite different patterned silicon substrates, cross-like pillar pattern and eye-like pattern, respectively. The results indicated that the surface pattern imposes a predetermined lattice orientation in colloidal crystals (CCs). Other influent factors, such as microsphere size, the altitude of pattern and the concentration of colloidal suspension, may also play an important role on the self-assembly process.