In recent years, innovations and consumer demands have led to increasingly complex liquid formulations. These growing complexities have provided industrial players and their customers access to new markets through product differentiation, improved performance, and compatibility/stability with other products. One strategy for enabling more complex formulations is the use of active encapsulation. When encapsulation is employed, strategies are required to effect the release of the active at the desired location and time of action. One particular route that has received significant academic research effort is the employment of triggers to induce active release upon a specific stimulus, though little has translated for industrial use to date. To address emerging industrial formulation needs, in this review, we discuss areas of trigger release chemistries and their applications specifically as relevant to industrial use. We focus the discussion on the use of heat, light, shear, and pH triggers as applied in several model polymeric systems for inducing active release. The goal is that through this review trends will emerge for how technologies can be better developed to maximize their value through industrial adaptation.

The majority of current pH-triggered release systems is designed to respond to either low or high pH. Encapsulants based on polyampholytes are an example of materials that can respond to both acidic and basic pH. However, polyampholyte-based encapsulants generally possess a low loading capacity and have difficulty retaining their small-molecule cargo. The current work utilizes interfacial polymerization between polyamines and a pyromellitic diester diacid chloride to form high capacity “liquid core–shell” polyamide microcapsules that are stable in a dry or nonpolar environment but undergo steady, controlled release at pH 7.4 and accelerated release at pH 5 and pH 10. The rate of release can be tuned by adjusting the amine cross-linker feed ratio, which varies the degree of cross-linking in the polymer shell. The thin-shell microcapsule exhibited suitable barrier properties and tunable dual acid/base-triggered release, with applications in a wide range of pH environments.