Abstract Scope |
A colloidal crystal is a porous metamaterial comprised of three-dimensional ordered arrays of similar size particles. Colloidal crystals are of interest to the scientific community because depending on particle shape, composition, size, and ordering colloidal crystals can exhibit novel optical, thermal, mechanical, and electromagnetic properties. Additionally, their inverses, inverse colloidal crystals, are of interest as they can exhibit significant stiffness and strength. In this work the scalable synthesis of colloidal crystals and their inverses via vibration induced colloidal assembly from powders and colloidal suspension of spheres from the millimeter scale to the nanometer scale is explored. How vibration parameters such as frequency, amplitude, and duration effect the ordering of the spheres is determined through models and experimentation in order to optimize the growth of large single crystal colloidal crystals suitable for industrial use. |