(197d) Tuning Lobed Colloid Design to Achieve Porous Morphologies

The self-assembly of colloids is emerging as a promising approach for designing new materials with applications in engineering and biomedical fields. A class of colloidal particles termed lobed colloids can be designed with protrusions (lobes) on their surfaces to provide directionality to interparticle interactions and enhanced excluded volume to facilitate porous self-assemblies. I will present results on self-assembly of several systems of lobed colloidal particles in which different characteristics of these particles, including their shapes, the sizes of their lobes, and the nature of their interparticle interactions, are varied. The systems were studied in either monodisperse (where all particles have the same shape) or polydisperse conditions (binary mixtures of particles with different shapes). The results reveal that the morphology and porosity of the self-assembled structures can be tuned by optimally designing the shapes and interparticle interactions among lobes. The relative size of the central seed particle and the lobes attached to it characterize the seed to lobe size ratio, which is found to be a key shape design parameter to achieve specific morphologies. Moreover, the polydisperse systems formed structures characterized by higher porosities in comparison to the monodisperse systems, which indicates that the composition of the system is also an important design feature for optimal self-assembly into desired morphologies.