Research Activities on Microemulsions

A ternary mixture of oil, water and surfactant can at a given mass relation between the constituents build a so called microemulsion. This is a thermodynamically stable transparent solution where aqueous nanodroplets of 5 - 25 nm are surrounded by a surfactant layer. The droplets can be loaded with reactants and via an exchange between the droplets a chemical reaction of different reactants can take place. This can lead to a particle precipitation where very small particles of nanometer range are produced.

Research of the phase diagram of ternary and quartenary systems of oil, water, surfactant and reactants: A Metropolis Monte-Carlo method is applied on a lattice model of the system in order to study the phase behavior for a variety of different systems. The influence of a head-tail distribution of the surfactant is studied as well as the influence of reactant ions on the phase behavior.

phase diagram

Particle precipitation in microemulsion droplets: The exchange, reaction, nucleation and growth phenomena and their interplay on different time scales are the important processes to model the particle precipitaion in microemulsion. A kinetic Monte-Carlo method is applied to this problem. It is used to investigate the dynamics of particle precipitation as well as to indentify suitable process control parameters for an upscale approach of this technology.

microemulsion
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©Andreas Voigt Last modified: 2015