Encapsulation and full retention of small molecular weight active ingredients is a challenging task that remains unsolved by current technologies used in industry and academia. In particular, certain everyday product formulations provide difficult environments in which preventing active leakage through capsule walls is not feasible. For example, a continuous phase that can fully dissolve an encapsulated active will typically force full release over a fraction of the intended lifetime of a product. This is due to the inherent porosity of polymeric membranes typically used as capsule wall material in current technologies. In this study, we demonstrate a method for preventing undesired loss of encapsulated actives under these extreme conditions using a simple threestep process. Our developed methodology, which forms an impermeable metal film around polymer microcapsules, prevents loss of small, volatile oils within an ethanol continuous phase for at least 21 days while polymeric capsules lose their entire content in less than 30 min under the same conditions. Polymer shell-oil core microcapsules are produced using a well-known cosolvent extraction method to precipitate a polymeric shell around the oil core. Subsequently, metallic catalytic nanoparticles are physically adsorbed onto the microcapsule polymeric shells. Finally, this nanoparticle coating is used to catalyze the growth of a secondary metallic film. Specifically, this work shows that it is possible to coat polymeric microcapsules containing a model oil system or a typical fragrance oil with a continuous metal shell. It also shows that the coverage of nanoparticles on the capsule surface can be controlled, which is paramount for obtaining a continuous impermeable metal film. In addition, control over the metal shell thickness is demonstrated without altering the capability of the metal film to retain the encapsulated oils.

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Efficient encapsulation of small chemical molecules and their controlled targeted delivery provides a very important challenge to be overcome for a wide range of industrial applications. Typically rapid diffusion of these actives across capsule walls has so far prevented the development of a versatile widely applicable solution. In an earlier publication, we have shown that thin metal shells are able to permanently retain small molecules. The critical step in the microcapsule synthesis is the formation of a strongly adsorbed, dense monolayer of catalytic nanoparticles on the surface as this affects the secondary metal film quality. Control over Pt-nanoparticle adsorption density and a clear understanding of Pt-nanoparticle adsorption kinetics is therefore paramount. Maximising the density of heterogeneous catalysts on surfaces is generally of interest to a broad range of applications. In this work, transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and quartz crystal microbalance (QCM) are used to demonstrate that the concentration of nanoparticle polymer stabilizer used during particle synthesis and nanoparticle suspension concentration can be used to control nanoparticle surface adsorption density. We demonstrate that excess polymer, which is often used in nanoparticle synthesis but rarely discussed as an important parameter in the literature, can compete with and thus drastically affect the adsorption of the Pt-nanoparticles.

Polymer microcapsules have been used commercially for decades, however they have an inherent flaw which renders them impractical as ac arriero fs mall, volatile molecules.T he porous nature of the polymer shell allows for diffusion of the encapsulatedm olecules into the bulk. The use of metal shells is an innovative way to prevent undesired loss of small molecules from the core of microcapsules, however it is important, particularly when using expensive metals to ensure that the resultings hell is as thin as possible. Here we investigate the fundamentalm echanisms controlling the gold shell thickness when af ragrance oili se ncapsulated in ap oly(methylm ethacrylate) shell. We consider the distribution of the nanoparticles on the capsules urface, and from quantificationo ft he adsorbed nanoparticle( NP) density and resultings hell thickness, we propose mechanisms to describe the gold shell growth for systems with high and low NP surface coverage. We suggest from our observations that the gold grows to fill in the gaps between NPs. At low NP concentrations, thicker metal shells form. We postulatet hat this is due to the low NP density on the surface, forcing the gold clusters to grow larger before they meet the adjacent ones.T hus, to grow the thinnest possible shells ad enselyp acked monolayer of platinum nanoparticles is requiredo nthe capsule surface.