Self- and cross-associations in two-component mixed polymer gels

Tea polyphenols encapsulated in W/O/W emulsions with xanthan gum-locust bean gum mixture: Evaluation of their stability and protection

Herein, improvement of the stability of the water-in-oil-in-water (W/O/W) emulsions by addition of xanthan gum (XG)/locust bean gum (LBG) mixture in the inner water phase was aimed. The impact of XG/LBG mixture on the physical stability, microstructure and rheological properties of W/O/W emulsions was investigated. It was found that, compared with the control emulsions, the presence of XG/LBG mixture could improve the stability of W/O/W emulsions against coalescence. The tea polyphenols (TPPs) and XG/LBG mixture were simultaneously included in the internal aqueous phase of the double emulsion and stored at 25 and 40 °C in the dark for 28 d. The results showed that XG/LBG mixture not only had a protective role for TPPs encapsulated in the internal water phase, but also maintained more than 50% of the antioxidant capacity of TPPs.

Different Gelation and Self-Sorting Properties of Two Isomeric Polyamides Owing to the Parallel versus Anti-Parallel Alignment of Backbone Dipoles

Two isomeric bottlebrush polyamides P-1 and A-1, with the same repeating monomer dipole units aligned along the polymer backbone in pseudo-parallel and pseudo-antiparallel fashion, respectively, were synthesized and characterized. Both polymers can form thermoreversible gels with aromatic solvents but P-1 was found to show inferior gelation strength compared with that of A-1. Furthermore, despite their close structural resemblance, a 1:1 mixture of the P-1 and A-1 polymers was shown to exhibit self-sorting in the gel state. Gel formation was found to be a kinetically trapped process through hydrogen bonding, π-π stacking interactions, and side chain interdigitation. The different gelation and self-sorting properties can be explained by the local dipole-dipole interactions originating from the different modes of backbone dipole alignment. In single gel systems, the antiparallel-aligned dipoles in A-1 facilitated a more compact molecular packing owing to the enthalpically more favorable polymer chain association. On the other hand, the parallel-aligned dipoles in P-1 gave rise to a less stable head-to-head packing, which had difficulties to convert to the more stable head-to-tail packing in a kinetically trapped environment. In the mixed gel system, it is the unfavorable hetero-polymer mismatch dipole-dipole interaction that inhibited the mixing of the A-1 and P-1 polymers and led to self-sorting.

On the interaction between konjac glucomannan and xanthan in mixed gels: an analysis based on the cascade model

The rheological properties and critical behavior of konjac glucomannan (KGM)/xanthan (XG) mixed gels were investigated and analyzed using a two-component cascade model. The fitting results show that the optimal functionality value for KGM (fKGM) is 3, whereas the possible functionality value for XG (fXG) is 100-1000 obtained from the modulus data, or 25 obtained from the critical data. The van't Hoff analysis of the critical data shows that the binding of KGM with XG has a high enthalpy/entropy ratio (ΔH/300ΔS=5.52), which can be explained by the gain in the hydrational entropy due to the release of water molecules during the binding reaction. From these results, we proposed that the binding of KGM with XG takes place on the consecutive glucose residues of KGM with six or more units.