The present invention is related to a hollow nano-particle comprising a crosslinked shell and a void core; and a preparation method thereof. The hollow nano-particle may be used in rubber compositions, tire products, and pharmaceutical delivery system, among other applications.
Nano-sized particles of various shapes and sizes are very important in modern industry for they can be used as, for example, processing aids and reinforcing fillers in a variety of fields including catalysis, combinatorial chemistry, protein supports, magnets, and photonic crystals. For example, nano-particles can modify rubbers by uniformly dispersing throughout a host rubber composition as discrete particles. The physical properties of rubber such as moldability and tenacity can often be improved through such modifications. However, a simple indiscriminate addition of nano-particles to rubber is likely to cause degradation of the matrix rubber material. Rather, very careful control and selection of nano-particles having suitable architecture, size, shape, material composition, and surface chemistry, etc., are needed to improve the rubber matrix characteristics.
Advantageously, the present invention provides hollow polymer nano-particles with well-controlled architectures such as controllable void core size. The hollow nanoparticles may be widely used in rubber compositions, tire products, and pharmaceutical delivery systems.