Issue 11, 2012
From the journal:

Soft Matter

Nano-mechanical properties of clay-armoured emulsion droplets

Sin-Ying Tan,a   Rico F. Tabor,ab   Lydia Ong,ac   Geoffrey W. Stevensa  and  Raymond R. Dagastine*ad  

* Corresponding authors

a Particulate Fluid Processing Centre, Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, The University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

b School of Chemistry, The University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

c The Bio21 Molecular Science and Biotechnology Institute, The University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

d Melbourne Centre for Nanofabrication, 151, Wellington Road, Clayton, Victoria, Australia
E-mail: rrd@unimelb.edu.au

Abstract

There has been a growing interest in understanding the stabilization mechanism of particle-armoured emulsion droplets over the last few decades due to their importance in many everyday products. Here, the mechanical properties of clay-armoured emulsion droplets were investigated using laser scanning confocal microscopy with an in situatomic force microscopy measurement. This combination allows the visualization of droplet shape as a function of applied force. The emulsion droplets were found to be mechanically robust, stable against coalescence during drop collisions and able to recover from large deformations without disintegration. A Hookean constitutive law was used to extract the surface Young's modulus of the clay-armoured droplets as a function of a range of solution conditions. The clay-armoured droplets were relatively insensitive to changes in solution ionic strength and pH. However, in the presence of cationic surfactants, the surface Young's modulus decreases and shows significant reduction well above the critical micelle concentration. These changes are most likely due to desorption of clay platelets from the oil–water interface after charge neutralisation and the eventual solubilisation of the oil droplet. The elasticity measurements in this study should help illuminate the impact of the clay-armoured droplets on macroscopic properties of emulsions including rheological properties and emulsion stability.

Graphical abstract: Nano-mechanical properties of clay-armoured emulsion droplets

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Article information

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1039/C2SM07370F
Article type
Paper
Submitted
14 Dec 2011
Accepted
23 Jan 2012
First published
03 Feb 2012

Soft Matter, 2012,8, 3112-3121

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Nano-mechanical properties of clay-armoured emulsion droplets

S. Tan, R. F. Tabor, L. Ong, G. W. Stevens and R. R. Dagastine, Soft Matter, 2012, 8, 3112 DOI: 10.1039/C2SM07370F

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