The interactions of microparticles, particularly those possessing nano- and microstructured asperities, play a critical role in many industrial applications. As a result, control over particle-particle and particle-surface interactions can be accomplished by designing microparticles with well-defined surface morphologies. Nature provides remarkable examples of evolutionary-optimized microscale biological particles with structures and/or chemistries tailored for effective adhesion to a variety of surfaces under different dynamic and environmental conditions. Prominent among these are pollen, which possess a range of ornamentations consisting of combinations of various morphologies and feature sizes. These surface structures, provided by a highly chemically and mechanically stable outer shell, make pollen a model bioparticle for evaluating geometric effects on adhesion.
This research aims to take advantage of pollen's unique architecture by utilizing it as a biotemplate for designing pollen-derived particles with tailorable microparticle adhesion. In this work, the adhesion behavior of pollen and pollen-derived particles is characterized using atomic force microscopy (AFM). Cleaned natural pollen particles were found to exhibit short-range van der Waals (VDW) adhesion strengths that were independent of surface chemistry and scaled with the tip radius of pollen's ornamentations. Employing pollen as a core material, electrostatic interactions were utilized to controllably coat metal nanoparticles onto pollen's surface. Metal nanoparticle-coated pollen particles displayed enhanced adhesion facilitated by multiple nanoparticle contacts with probe surfaces, while also showing potential for use as surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) substrates. Using pollen as a template, a layer-by-layer (LbL) surface sol-gel (SSG) technique allowed for the preparation of high-fidelity ferro- and ferrimagnetic replicas exhibiting short-range VDW-based adhesion governed by the contact of nanocrystals present, and long-range magnetic attraction governed by the magnetic properties of ferrimagnetic pollen replicas. The results of this work highlight the feasibility of utilizing pollen as a bio-organic template and the potential for designing pollen-derived particles with tailorable adhesion.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:GATECH/oai:smartech.gatech.edu:1853/52963 |
| Date | 12 January 2015 |
| Creators | Gomez, Ismael J. |
| Contributors | Meredith, Carson |
| Publisher | Georgia Institute of Technology |
| Source Sets | Georgia Tech Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
Page generated in 0.002 seconds