Investigating enzymatic polymerized polysaccharide particles as stabilizing agents for emulsions and foams

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Foams and emulsions touch many areas of modern society. Consumers encounter them in food and personal care products. Industries use them in distillation, oil recovery, and the removal of pollutants from environmental media. In many products and processes, the performance of foams and emulsions depends strongly on their microstructure and the mechanism that stabilizes the bubbles and droplets. Recent advances in engineered nanomaterials have provided new tools to influence the microstructure of foams and emulsions. This opens a new horizon for improving and tuning the performance of these complex fluids for existing and new products and applications. Nanomaterials derived or synthesized from renewable resources (e.g., cellulose nanomaterials, starch nanocrystals, and chitin nanocrystals) are a particularly attractive feature of this new horizon. They often exhibit properties not achievable with conventional metal oxide nanoparticles. The emerging platform technology of enzymatic polymerization recently introduced by our proposed partner, DuPont Nutrition and BioSciences, allows access to engineered polysaccharide based materials at scale. This platform broadens the design space for complex fluids by offering biobased particles in a variety of morphologies but with the same chemical composition. These particles are produced at scale by a bottom-up synthesis approach, which permits tuning their morphology. The goal of this partnership is to understand (i) the nature of particle-particle interactions between these engineered polysaccharide particles at fluid/fluid interfaces in emulsions and foams and (ii) the effect of these interactions on microstructure and stabilization of foams and emulsions. We will study the particles on their own and their potential for synergistic interaction with surfactants. The goal is a sustainable materials solution for current applications of foams and emulsions, while improving their performance. These materials are 100% biobased and biodegradable, avoiding the formation of microplastics - an urgent global challenge.