Rheology of magnetic colloids containing clusters of particle platelets and polymer nanofibres
Identificadores
URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10481/67867Metadatos
Mostrar el registro completo del ítemFecha
2020Referencia bibliográfica
Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A 378: 20190255 (2020)
Patrocinador
This study was supported by project no. FIS2017-85954-R (Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad, MINECO, and Agencia Estatal de Investigación, AEI, Spain, cofunded by Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional, FEDER, European Union).Resumen
Magnetic hydrogels (ferrogels) are soft materials with a wide range of applications, especially in biomedicine because: (i) They can be provided with the required biocompatibility; (ii) their heterogeneous structure allows their use as scaffolds for tissue engineering; (iii) their mechanical properties can be modified by changing different design parameters or by the action of magnetic fields. These characteristics confer them unique properties for acting as patterns that mimic the architecture of biological systems. In addition, (iv) given their high porosity and aqueous content, ferrogels can be loaded with drugs and guided toward specific targets for local (non-systemic) pharmaceutical treatments. The ferrogels prepared in this work contain magnetic particles obtained by precipitation of magnetite nanoparticles onto the porous surface of bentonite platelets. Then, the particles were functionalized by adsorption of alginate molecules and dispersed in an aqueous solution of sodium alginate. Finally, the gelation was promoted by crosslinking the alginate molecules with Ca2+ ions. The viscoelastic properties of the ferrogels were measured in the absence/presence of external magnetic fields, showing that these ferrogels exhibited a strong enough magnetorheological effect. This behaviour is explained considering the field-induced strengthening of the heterogeneous (particle-polymer) network generated inside the ferrogel.