Colloids with lobed
architectures have been shown to self-assemble
into promising porous structures with potential biomedical applications.
The synthesis of these colloids via experiments can be tuned to vary
the number and the position of the lobes. However, the polydispersity
involving the numbers, sizes, and the dispositions of lobes, that
is often observed in particle designs, can significantly affect their
self-assembled structures. In this work, we go beyond the uniform
lobe size conditions commonly considered in molecular simulations,
and probe the effect of polydispersity due to non-uniform lobe sizes
by studying self-assembly in three experimentally observable designs
of lobed particles (dumbbell, two lobes; trigonal planar, three lobes;
and tetrahedral, four lobes), using coarse-grained Langevin dynamics
simulations in the NVT ensemble. With increasing polydispersity, we
observed the formation of a crystalline structure from a disordered
state for the dumbbell system, and a loss of order in the crystalline
structures for the trigonal planar system. The tetrahedral system
retained a crystalline structure with only a minor loss in compactness.
We observed that the effect of polydispersity on the self-assembled
morphology of a given system can be minimized by increasing the number
of lobes. The polydispersity in the lobe size may also be useful in
tuning self-assemblies toward desired structures.