Solid material with a circular cross section (or with circularities near 1). Typical sizes of macrocapsules (also named capsules) are between hundreds of micrometers to millimeters. Macrocapsules have a thick porous wall with a small empty core (or nonexistent empty core) (Pena et al. 2009). This characteristic causes the differentiation between them and macrospheres, which are similar but have a dense and thin wall and a large empty volume inside (Lakshmi et al. 2012).
A main use of macrocapsules is to store compounds inside, which are released in a controlled way and from different parameters (Pena et al. 2009). First of all, there should be a driven force that usually is concentration gradient. Secondly, permeability occurs through the wall due to convection and diffusion. Depending on the type of process, each of them can be the predominant. For instance, considering macrocapsules with dense and thick wall, where only a concentration gradient occurs, diffusion is predominant and...
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Font, C.T. (2016). Macrocapsules. In: Drioli, E., Giorno, L. (eds) Encyclopedia of Membranes. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-44324-8_1528
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