Formation of bijels stabilized by magnetic ellipsoidal particles in external magnetic fields
Date
2024-10-08
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Soft Matter
Abstract
Bicontinuous interfacially-jammed emulsion gels (bijels) are increasingly used as emulsion templates for the fabrication of functional porous materials including membranes, electrodes, and biomaterials. Control over the domain size and structure is highly desirable in these applications. For bijels stabilized by spherical particles, particle size and volume fraction are the main parameters that determine the emulsion structure. Here, we investigate the use of ellipsoidal magnetic particles and study the effect of external magnetic fields on the formation of bijels. Using hybrid Lattice Boltzmann-molecular dynamics simulations, we analyze the effect of the magnetic field on emulsion dynamics and the structural properties of the resulting bijel. We find that the formation of bijels remains robust in the presence of magnetic fields, and that the domain size and tortuosity become anisotropic when ellipsoidal particles are used. We show that the magnetic fields lead to orientational ordering of the particles which in turn leads to alignment of the interfaces. The orientational order facilitates enhanced packing of particles in the interface which leads to different jamming times in the directions parallel and perpendicular to the field. Our results highlight the potential of magnetic particles for fabrication and processing of emulsion systems with tunable properties.
Description
This article was originally published in Soft Matter. The version of record is available at: https://doi.org/10.1039/D4SM00751D.
This journal is © The Royal Society of Chemistry 2024.
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported Licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/).
Keywords
Citation
Karthikeyan, Nikhil, and Ulf D. Schiller. “Formation of Bijels Stabilized by Magnetic Ellipsoidal Particles in External Magnetic Fields.” Soft Matter 20, no. 45 (2024): 8952–67. https://doi.org/10.1039/D4SM00751D.