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<p>Multiple emulsions with excellent monodispersity and tailorable compositions exhibit great application potential in analytical detection, material synthesis and various other fields. To achieve the spatially patterned wettability that is essential for generating multiple emulsions in microfluidic chips, hydrophilic modification of polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) microchannels is indispensable for constructing alternating hydrophilic-hydrophobic surface distributions. However, the complexity of such surface treatment increases with the order of multiple emulsions, rendering the development of a simple and controllable hydrophilic modification strategy for PDMS chips to fabricate high-order emulsions a persistent challenge. Herein, we present a rapid patterning method for PDMS microchannels dedicated to high-order emulsion generation. This approach enables the simultaneous hydrophilic treatment of multiple open microchannels on a PDMS substrate via manual polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) coating prior to chip bonding, obviating the need for additional instrumentation or precise fluid control operations. Furthermore, it allows for the selective modification of distinct microchannel regions, which well caters to the customized fabrication of multiple emulsions with designed structures. Based on the proposed protocol, multiple emulsions ranging from double to quintuple emulsions were successfully generated in a facile and highly stable manner. As a proof-of-concept application, these high-order emulsions were employed as sacrificial templates to fabricate onion-like hydrogel microcapsules, which featured uniform spherical morphologies and well-defined multilayer architectures. The coefficient of variation (CV) of the diameter for all prepared microcapsules was ≤ 2.3% (<i>n</i> = 50). Notably, the multilayer architecture of the hydrogel microcapsules can be precisely tailored by selective hydrophilic surface modification—switching from water/oil (W/O) to oil/water (O/W) wettability, or transforming core-shell structures into onion-like microcapsules. These tailor-made multilayer hydrogel microcapsules thus represent promising candidates for the encapsulation of various active substances and functional cargos in both industrial and scientific applications.</p>

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Rapid equipment-free patterning of PDMS microchannel for the simple generation of high-order emulsion and hydrogel microcapsules

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年2月13日

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  • Lu-Lu Liu,
  • Wen-Qi Ye,
  • Chun-Guang Yang,
  • Zhang-Run Xu

摘要

Multiple emulsions with excellent monodispersity and tailorable compositions exhibit great application potential in analytical detection, material synthesis and various other fields. To achieve the spatially patterned wettability that is essential for generating multiple emulsions in microfluidic chips, hydrophilic modification of polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) microchannels is indispensable for constructing alternating hydrophilic-hydrophobic surface distributions. However, the complexity of such surface treatment increases with the order of multiple emulsions, rendering the development of a simple and controllable hydrophilic modification strategy for PDMS chips to fabricate high-order emulsions a persistent challenge. Herein, we present a rapid patterning method for PDMS microchannels dedicated to high-order emulsion generation. This approach enables the simultaneous hydrophilic treatment of multiple open microchannels on a PDMS substrate via manual polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) coating prior to chip bonding, obviating the need for additional instrumentation or precise fluid control operations. Furthermore, it allows for the selective modification of distinct microchannel regions, which well caters to the customized fabrication of multiple emulsions with designed structures. Based on the proposed protocol, multiple emulsions ranging from double to quintuple emulsions were successfully generated in a facile and highly stable manner. As a proof-of-concept application, these high-order emulsions were employed as sacrificial templates to fabricate onion-like hydrogel microcapsules, which featured uniform spherical morphologies and well-defined multilayer architectures. The coefficient of variation (CV) of the diameter for all prepared microcapsules was ≤ 2.3% (n = 50). Notably, the multilayer architecture of the hydrogel microcapsules can be precisely tailored by selective hydrophilic surface modification—switching from water/oil (W/O) to oil/water (O/W) wettability, or transforming core-shell structures into onion-like microcapsules. These tailor-made multilayer hydrogel microcapsules thus represent promising candidates for the encapsulation of various active substances and functional cargos in both industrial and scientific applications.