Journal of the American Ceramic Society, Vol.101, No.9, 3787-3796, 2018
Microfluidic fabrication of ceramic microspheres with controlled morphologies
In this study, the diffusion-induced external gelation is combined with a microfluidic technique to prepare monodisperse ZrO2 ceramic microspheres. The gelation of sol droplets is traced by fluorescence visualization of the local pH, and it illustrates the effect of the external concentration of triggering agent (tetramethylethylenediamine, TMEDA) on the formation of the gel network, which results in 3 kinds of deformation of the gel particles. The deformation mechanism mainly lies in the imbalanced Laplace pressure exerted on the gel network during the competition between the gelation and the drying processes. By regulating the concentration of TMEDA, the monodisperse ZrO2 ceramic microspheres with high sphericity can be readily fabricated.