Microfluidic synthesis of monodisperse porous microspheres with size-tunable pores

Fabrication of porous polymer microspheres by tuning amphiphilicity of the polymer and emulsion–solvent evaporation processing

“…Density and size of the pores played important roles in determining the properties of the porous polymer spheres, including drug encapsulation efficiency and release kinetics [21][22][23][24][25][26][27]. Although many porous microspheres have been prepared by using porogens, it is a great challenge to control the size of microspheres and pores independently when porogens were used [4,[28][29][30][31]. Thus, it is highly desirable to explore a more facile and effective approach to produce porous microspheres with tunable structures.…”

Controllable microfluidic strategies for fabricating microparticles using emulsions as templates

“…Moreover, by controllably encapsulating gas bubbles in monomer-containing aqueous droplets as pore templates, polyacrylamide microparticles with porous structures can be developed via an UV-polymerization process that requires no template removal (Wan et al, 2008). Porous structures in microparticles from oil droplets that contain monomers, polymers, and colloids can be created using pore templates such as assembled copolymers (Duncanson et al, 2012) and surfactants, phase separation domains (Jiang, Sposito, Liu, Raghavan, & DeVoe, 2012), bubbles, and sacrificial colloids. For example, by adding decyl alcohol as a porogen, oil droplet-containing glycidyl methacrylate (GMA) were converted into porous microparticles via phase separation under UV-polymerization (Fig.…”

“…The porous polyGMA matrix of the microparticles can be further modified with bioactive ligands for immunoassay. Another typical example is monodisperse polylactic acid microparticles with controllable porous structures engineered from assembly of the porogen, a fluorous dendrimer-dye complex (Duncanson et al, 2012). The pore size can be readily tuned by variation of the dendrimer-dye complex used in the droplet templates.…”

Porous microsphere and its applications

“…Also, the porogens usually require a long time to leach out completely. [14][15][16] Though with some drawbacks, fabricating porous microspheres with a porogen is widely reported. The commonly used porogens are effervescent salts like ammonium bicarbonate, inorganic salts like sodium chloride, hydrocarbon waxes, linear polymers, carbohydrates, gelatin, ice, and sugar.…”