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

泡沫和乳剂触及现代社会的许多领域。消费者在食品和个人护理产品中会遇到它们。工业上使用它们进行蒸馏、石油回收和从环境介质中去除污染物。在许多产品和工艺中，泡沫和乳液的性能在很大程度上取决于它们的微观结构和稳定气泡和液滴的机制。工程纳米材料的最新进展为影响泡沫和乳液的微观结构提供了新的工具。这为改善和调整这些复杂流体的性能为现有和新产品和应用开辟了新的视野。从可再生资源中提取或合成的纳米材料（如纤维素纳米材料、淀粉纳米晶体和几丁质纳米晶体）是这一新领域的一个特别有吸引力的特征。它们通常表现出传统金属氧化物纳米颗粒无法实现的特性。我们提议的合作伙伴杜邦营养与生物科学公司最近推出了新兴的酶聚合平台技术，使大规模生产工程多糖基材料成为可能。该平台通过提供具有相同化学成分的多种形态的生物基颗粒，拓宽了复杂流体的设计空间。这些粒子是通过自下而上的合成方法大规模生产的，这种方法允许调整它们的形态。此次合作的目标是了解(i)这些工程多糖颗粒在乳剂和泡沫中流体/流体界面上的颗粒-颗粒相互作用的性质，以及（ii）这些相互作用对泡沫和乳剂的微观结构和稳定性的影响。我们将研究这些粒子本身以及它们与表面活性剂协同作用的潜力。目标是为当前泡沫和乳液的应用提供可持续的材料解决方案，同时提高其性能。这些材料是100%生物基和可生物降解的，避免了微塑料的形成——这是一个紧迫的全球挑战。

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.