A Multiscale Approach to the Design and Manipulation of Oil-in-Water Emulsion-Based Products

Abstract

Advances in computational technology and high-throughput modeling software have given rise to the tailored design of products that require accurate mathematical relationships for their assessment. Industrial emulsion-based products, ubiquitous to everyday life, are complex systems driven by interfacial phenomena that require quick property-prediction tools for their commercialization. In this work, by means of a multiscale approach, mathematical relationships to model oil-in-water emulsions and that can be applied to any commercial emulsion-based product are proposed. The energy consumption during the emulsification process (Ev, which transitions from monotonic increase to exponential growth at 80% w/w), a parameter responsible for finished product performance, was linked to final product properties at three different levels: (i) molecular, through the dynamics of the interdroplet interactions given their distribution and structure at a microscopic level; (ii) microscopic, through average droplet size yielding an inversely proportional exponential relationship (D4,3 ∝ Ev-4); and (iii) macroscopic, through the plateau value of the elastic modulus and the flow behavior index leading to inversely proportional quadratic relationships (G′∝ Ev-2 and η∝ Ev-2, respectively). These relationships are valid at dispersed phase concentrations beyond the 60% w/w threshold where the packing of the droplets changes the emulsion's microscopic structure giving rise to Van der Waals forces-driven phenomena. Finding this threshold allowed expanding the concentration ranges of previously reported models. The main expectation is that these results will aid researchers and process/product designers to optimize their work in different industrial applications.