Colloidal patchy particles in recent years have emerged as novel building blocks which self-assemble into higher order structures dictated by their shapes and directional interactions. Depending on the specific techniques used and the choice of starting ingredients it has been possible to synthesize soft and hard type patchy particles at different length scales. Although a significant effort has been made to prepare these kind of colloidal particles, extensive study on their self-assembly, mainly for the lobed particles (patchy particles where patches appear as lobes around a seed) is yet to be explored. In this work, we have studied the self-assembly of seven different hard lobed particles of different shapes using coarse-grained Langevin dynamics simulations and show that various types of unique self-assembled morphologies can be achieved by tuning the attractive interactions between the lobes. The linear building blocks having two lobes around the seed show self-assembly only at higher attractive interactions and were found to form rings of different sizes in their self-assembled structures. The trigonal planar building blocks were found to generate cylindrical hollow tubes at lower interactions and two-dimensional sheets at higher attractive interactions . The square planar building blocks were found to form spherical clathrates. The tetrahedral, trigonal bipyramid and octahedral shaped particles were found to form compact porous clusters which are constituted by either hexagonal close packed or face centered cubic lattices. The pore size distributions are also estimated for the self-assembled clusters. Depending on the higher order structures produced, these lobed particles may have potential applications in various fields like tissue engineering, in the study of host guest chemistry, adsorption, and catalysis.

Self-assembly of lobed particles into porous morphologies

Macromolecular Chemistry: The Second Century

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ACS Spring 2020 National Meeting & Expo

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.