Surfactant Partitioning in Nanoemulsions

Sources, colloidal characteristics, and separation technologies for highly hazardous waste nanoemulsions

Nanoemulsions play a crucial role in various industries. However, their application often results in hazardous waste, posing significant risks to human health and the environment. Effective management and separation of waste nanoemulsions requires special attention and effort. This review provides a comprehensive understanding of waste nanoemulsions, covering their sources, characteristics, and suitable treatment technologies, intending to mitigate their environmental impact. This study examines the evolution of nanoemulsions from beneficial products to hazardous wastes, provides an overview of the production processes, fate, and hazards of waste nanoemulsions, and highlights the critical characteristics that affect their stability. The latest advancements in separating waste nanoemulsions for recovering oil and reusable water resources are also presented, providing a comprehensive comparison and evaluation of the current treatment techniques. This review addresses the significant challenges in nanoemulsion treatment, provides insights into future research directions, and offers valuable implications for the development of more effective strategies to mitigate the hazards associated with waste nanoemulsions.

Modeling colloidal interactions that predict equilibrium and non-equilibrium states

Modulating the interaction potential between colloids suspended in a fluid can trigger equilibrium phase transitions as well as formation of non-equilibrium 'arrested states' such as gels and glasses. Faithful representation of such interactions are essential for using simulation to interrogate the microscopic details of non-equilibrium behavior, and for extrapolating observations to new regions of phase space that are difficult to explore in experiment. Although the extended law of corresponding states predicts equilibrium phases for systems with short-ranged interactions, it proves inadequate for equilibrium predictions of systems with longer-ranged interactions, and for predicting non-equilibrium phenomena in systems with either short-ranged or long-ranged interactions. These shortcomings highlight the need for new approaches to represent and disambiguate interaction potentials that replicate both equilibrium and non-equilibrium phase behavior. In this work, we use experiments and simulations to study a system with long-ranged thermoresponsive colloidal interactions and explore whether a resolution to this challenge can be found in regions of the phase diagram where temporal effects influence material state. We demonstrate that the conditions for non-equilibrium arrest by colloidal gelation are sensitive to both the shape of the interaction potential and the thermal quench rate. We exploit this sensitivity to propose a kinetics-based algorithm to extract distinct arrest conditions for candidate potentials that accurately selects between potentials that differ in shape but share the same predicted equilibrium structure. The method reveals that each potential has a quantitatively distinct arrest line, providing insight into how the shape of longer-ranged potentials influences the conditions for colloidal gelation.

Freezing of Dilute Aqueous-Alcohol Nanodroplets: The Effect of Molecular Structure

We investigate vapor-liquid nucleation and subsequent freezing of aqueous-alcohol nanodroplets containing 1-pentanol, 1-hexanol, and their 3-isomers. The aerosols are produced in a supersonic nozzle, where condensation and freezing are characterized by static pressure and Fourier transform Infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy measurements. At fixed water concentrations, the presence of alcohol enables particle formation at higher temperatures since both the equilibrium vapor pressure above the critical clusters and the cluster interfacial free energy are decreased relative to the pure water case. The disappearance of a small free OH peak, observed for pure water droplets, when alcohols are added and shifts in the CH peaks as a function of alcohol chain length reveal varying surface partitioning preferences of the alcohols. Changes in the FTIR spectra during freezing, as well as changes in the ice component derived from self-modeling curve resolution analysis, show that 1-hexanol and 1-pentanol perturb freezing less than their branched isomers do. This behavior may reflect the molecular footprints of the alcohols, the available surface area of the droplets, and not only alcohol solubility. The presence of alcohols also lowers the freezing temperature relative to that of pure water, but when there is clear evidence for the formation of ice, the ice nucleation rates change by less than a factor of ∼2-3 for all cases studied.

Effects of Salt-Induced Charge Screening on AOT Adsorption to the Planar and Nanoemulsion Oil-Water Interfaces

Nanoemulsions, nanosized droplets of oil, are easily stabilized by interfacial electric fields from the adsorption of ionic surfactants. While mean-field theories can be used to describe the impact of these interfacial fields on droplet stability, the influence of these fields on the adsorption properties of ionic surfactants is not well-understood. In this work, we study the adsorption of the surfactant sodium dioctyl sulfosuccinate (AOT) at the nanoemulsion and planar oil-water interfaces and investigate how salt-induced charge-screening affects AOT adsorption. In the absence of salt, vibrational sum-frequency scattering spectroscopy measurements reveal the ΔG_ads and the maximum surface density is the same for AOT at the hexadecane nanoemulsion surface as at the planar hexadecane-H₂O interface. Upon the addition of NaCl, an increase in AOT surface density is detected at both interfaces, indicating that repulsive electrostatic interactions between AOT monomers are the dominant force limiting surfactant adsorption at both interfaces. The bulky alkyl chains of AOT molecules cause our observations in this study to differ from those found in previous studies investigating the adsorption of linear-chain ionic surfactants to the nanoemulsion surface. These results provide necessary information for understanding factors limiting the adsorption of ionic surfactants to nanodroplet surfaces and highlight the need for further studies into the adsorption properties of more complex macromolecules at nanoemulsion surfaces.

Corn Oil-Water Separation: Interactions of Proteins and Surfactants at Corn Oil/Water Interfaces

Purification and collection of industrial products from oil-water mixtures are commonly implemented processes. However, the efficiencies of such processes can be severely influenced by the presence of emulsifiers that induce the formation of small oil droplets dispersed in the mixtures. Understanding of this emulsifying effect and its counteractions which occur at the oil/water interface is therefore necessary for the improvement of designs of these processes. In this paper, we investigated the interfacial mechanisms of protein-induced emulsification and the opposing surfactant-induced demulsification related to corn oil refinement. At corn oil/water interfaces, the pH-dependent emulsifying function of zein protein, which is the major storage protein of corn, was elucidated by the surface/interface-sensitive sum frequency generation (SFG) vibrational spectroscopy technique. The effective stabilization of corn oil droplets by zein protein was illustrated and correlated to its ordered amide I group at the oil/water interface. Substantial decrease of this ordering with the addition of three industrial surfactants to corn oil-zein solution mixtures was also observed using SFG, which explains the surfactant-induced destabilization and coalescence of small oil droplets. Surfactant-protein interaction was then demonstrated to be the driving force for the disordering of interfacial proteins, either by disrupting protein layers or partially excluding protein molecules from the interface. The ordered zein proteins at the interface were therefore revealed to be the critical factor for the formation of corn oil-water emulsion.