Absorption Properties of Microgel‐PVP Composite Nanofibers Made by Electrospinning

Abstract

The absorption and desorption of water, as well as the retention of certain molecules within a polymeric network, have special interest in a wide range of applications, including drug delivery, biosensing, chemical separation, catalysis, and optics. In this communication, we report the encapsulation by electrospinning of poly(N-isopropylacrylamide)-based monodisperse microgels within microfibers of crosslinked poly(vinylpyrrolidone), which is a hydrogel itself, up to concentrations of 40 wt.-% of the microgels. We present an optical characterization of these composite microfibers and quantify their absorbance, which can be as large as 17 times their de-swollen weight. Interestingly, this absorbance can be tuned by controlling the values of the temperature and the pH of the medium.

Thermoresponsive Poly(N-Isopropylacrylamide-co-Dimethylaminoethyl Methacrylate) Microgel Aqueous Dispersions with Potential Antimicrobial Properties

“…After decades of research, polymeric microgels have demonstrated to be versatile systems with potential applications as diverse as industrial applications as paints, ink jets printing, separation [3] and biomedical applications such as drug delivery systems [4,5], biomimicking artificial synovial fluids [6], tissue mimicking [7] and injectable 3D cell scaffolds [8]. Besides the mentioned advanced applications, microgel can be used as building blocks to create structures such as colloidal crystals, films and gels in the macroscopic scale [9,10,11,12], but also as active sites incorporated within functional polymer matrices so that the design of tailored multifunctional materials can be obtained [13,14]. Following this idea, in a recent work we used thermoresponsive poly( N -isopropylacrylamide), (PNIPAM) based microgels as active sites encapsulated into polymeric nanofiber as a first approach toward the design of new active wound dressings [15,16].…”

Preparation of animal polysaccharides nanofibers by electrospinning and their potential biomedical applications

“…Scaffolds of hybrids or composites, which are made of electrospun fibers and gel, may have unexpected influence on cell behaviors . Microgel electrospinning is a technology for fabricating a composite material based on microgel particles trapped inside nanofibers . A biomimetic bilayer sheath composed of microgel HA/PCL fibrous membrane as the inner layer and PCL fibrous as the outer layer was prepared via sequential and microgel electrospinning .…”

A Way to Predict Gold Nanoparticles/Polymer Hybrid Microgel Agglomeration Based on Rheological Studies

“…These smart materials have received much attention owing to their environmentally tunable sizes and potential applications, such as chemical separation, catalysis, sensors, enzyme immobilization, drug delivery systems, biomimicking artificial synovial fluids, tissue mimicking, and injectable 3D cell scaffolds, among others [3,4,5,6,7,8]. Besides the mentioned advanced applications, microgels are used as building blocks to create structures such as colloidal crystals, films, and gels in the macroscopic scale [9,10,11,12], and more recently as active sites confined within electrospun polymer fibers toward the design of tailored multifunctional stimuli-responsive advanced materials [13,14,15,16]. In our previous works, we first developed poly(acrylamide- co- acrylic acid) microgels featured with the ability to swell upon heating, thus showing a positive thermosensitivity and an upper critical solution temperature-like (UCST) volume phase transition temperature [17,18].…”