Impact Driven Liquid Encapsulation: Promises, Development, and Future Prospects

Encapsulation creates a protective outer layer(s) around a core cargo, which safeguards the cargo in aggressive surroundings. It also serves as a platform to impart various desired characteristics to the core cargo, including shell-functionalization and targeted release characteristics. Encapsulation can be broadly classified into three categories: physical, chemical, and physicochemical techniques. This perspective focuses on an emerging class of impact-driven physical encapsulation techniques, which offers several lucrative prospects compared to conventional encapsulation methods, including straightforward execution and ultrafast yet controlled wrapping. Two different categories of impact-driven methods for achieving stable, ultrafast encapsulation of various core liquid analytes with one or more wrapping layers are discussed, namely, elastocapillary wrapping with ultrathin sheet(s) and a liquid–liquid encapsulation framework, where thin liquid film(s) are used to wrap liquid analytes, with an emphasis on the latter. The promising prospects of both approaches are discussed, recent developments are outlined, and areas of future research that can lead to a truly versatile and comprehensive encapsulation platform applicable to a broad range of practical applications are highlighted.