Fabrication and Scalable Production of Nanobottles

This grant supports research that will create new knowledge related to the manufacturing of nanobottles made of diverse materials, together with controllable dimensions, shapes, and opening sizes. Macroscopic bottles are ubiquitous in our everyday life. The unique design of a bottle offers immediate advantages in terms of easiness and convenience for packaging, storage, and transportation.

While there are mature technologies for manufacturing macroscopic bottles made of glasses, metals, and polymers on an industrial scale, it is impossible to apply the same technology to the fabrication of nanoscopic (or even microscopic) bottles due to lack of tools capable of handling such minuscule structures. This grant supports fundamental research to provide needed knowledge for the development of a precise and robust method for fabricating nanobottles and the results from this research will benefit the U.S. economy and society.

The nanobottles are increasingly preferred for applications involving encapsulation, controlled release, and drug delivery, with immediate impacts on biomedicine and healthcare. They are also expected to enable the encapsulation and controlled release of chemical substances essential to environmental remediation and agriculture. The multi-disciplinary and collaborative nature will help broaden participation of underrepresented groups in research, offering a vehicle to enrich the education and training experiences of participating students.

The results from this research will be further adapted to enhance classroom teaching, including the development of demonstrations, e.g. animations and experiments, related to the key concepts of materials science and biomedical engineering.

This research will focus on nanobottles in the form of colloidal hollow particles of 50−500 nm in diameter, together with a single hole in the otherwise impermeable wall. By coating the surface of a colloidal template with a different material and then selectively etching away the template, one can obtain a hollow particle with its size and shape precisely defined by the template.

This method has been successfully applied to a variety of materials, but there is no reliable strategy for generating a well-controlled hole in the wall of the hollow particle. This research is to fill the knowledge gap on the mechanism(s) of hole creation by swelling the shell-coated template with a solvent. When the swelling-induced pressure reaches a critical level, it will spontaneously poke a hole in the shell to release the pressure and allow the swollen template to escape through the opening.

This fabrication method can be applied to essentially all types of materials, including ceramics, metals, and polymers, as long as they can be coated on the colloidal templates as uniform shells. Both the coating and swelling processes will be experimentally investigated and theoretically modeled to establish a mechanistic understanding and insightful guidance necessary for the future manufacturing of nanobottles.

In a proof-of-concept demonstration, the nanobottles will be evaluated for the encapsulation and then controlled release of a therapeutic agent for the eradication of cancer cells.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.