Paper Number
SF26
Session
Surfactants, Foams, and Emulsions
Title
Controlling nanoemulsion self-assembly via thermoresponsive attractive and repulsive interactions
Presentation Date and Time
October 22, 2019 (Tuesday) 4:35
Track / Room
Track 5 / Room 306A
Authors
- Cheng, Li-Chiun (MIT)
- Hashemnejad, Seyed Meysam (MIT)
- Doyle, Patrick S. (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Chemical Engineering)
Author and Affiliation Lines
Li-Chiun Cheng, Seyed Meysam Hashemnejad, and Patrick S. Doyle
Department of Chemical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02142
Speaker / Presenter
Cheng, Li-Chiun
Text of Abstract
Nanoemulsions are widely used in applications such as in food products, pharmaceutical materials and cosmetics. Moreover, nanoemulsions have been a model colloidal system due to their ease of synthesis and the flexibility in formulations that allows one to engineer the inter-droplet potentials and thus to rationally tune the material microstructures and rheological properties. In this project, we study a nanoemulsion system in which the inter-droplet interactions are modulated by temperature. At elevated temperatures, the non-monotonic increase of both attractive and repulsive interactions gives rise to a non-intuitive mode of droplet self-assembly, leading to interesting microstructures and rheological properties of the system. The underlying mechanism is obtained by carefully characterizing the nanoemulsion droplets and studying the interactions at the molecular level. Such mechanistic understanding also provides guidance to modulate the inter-droplet potential using another stimulus such as pH and ionic strengths. The control of the competition of attractive and repulsive interactions using external stimuli opens up the possibility to design complex nanoemulsion-based soft materials with highly controllable structures and rheological properties.