Controlled reversible buckling of polydopamine spherical microcapsules: revealing the hidden rich phenomena of post-buckling of spherical polymeric shells

Under external pressure compression, various kinds of artificial microcapsules can undergo buckling induced deformation and catastrophic rupturing failure, which needs to be understood for their diverse practical applications. For this, many theories and numerical simulations have recently emerged, leading to some intriguing but often debatable predictions and scaling laws. However, experimental testing of these predictions is very limited, due to challenges in realizing prescribed buckling pathways and in situ monitoring of the buckling procedure. Herein, we report the buckling behaviors of well-defined spherical polydopamine (PDA) capsules with tunable sizes and homogeneous nanoscale shells. Simple but controlled solvent evaporation was implemented inside a home-made optical chamber to induce buckling of PDA capsules by following a prescribed pathway toward targeted shapes that are only dictated by the inherent material properties of the capsules. In addition, the buckling speed was slowed down to the timescale of minutes, which can prevent buckling from being trapped at some metastable intermediate states as well as facilitating in situ optical monitoring of the whole buckling procedure in slow motion. In this way, several classic buckling behaviors were clearly observed, including the sudden appearance of spinodal-like dimples above critical pressures, transition of the indentation rim from the axisymmetric to polygonal shape, and evolution of multi-indented buckling into single indented buckling following Ostwald ripening. These observations are qualitatively comparable with recent predictions from numerical results. Furthermore, some novel buckling phenomena have been reported for the first time, which might stimulate further theories and numerical simulations. Rich post-buckling phenomena of spherical polymeric shells are revealed by controlled reversible buckling of polydopamine spherical microcapsules.