Date of Award
2-2010
Document type
dissertation
Access Type
Open Access Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Degree Program
Chemical Engineering
First Advisor
Surita R. Bhatia
Second Advisor
Susan C. Roberts
Third Advisor
Paul L. Dubin
Subject Categories
Chemical Engineering
Abstract
Microemulsions have important applications in various industries, including enhanced oil recovery, reactions, separations, drug delivery, cosmetics and foods. We investigated two different kinds of water-in-oil microemulsion systems, AOT (bis(2-ethylhexyl) sulfosuccinate) microemulsions with various counterions and perfluorocarbon-based microemulsion gels with triblock copolymers. In the AOT systems, we investigated the viscosity and interdroplet interactions in Ca(AOT)2, Mg(AOT)2 and KAOT microemulsions, and compared our results with the commonly-studied NaAOT/water/decane system. We attribute the differences in behavior to different hydration characteristics of the counterions, and we believe that the results are consistent with a previously proposed charge fluctuation model. Perfluorocarbons (PFCs) are of interest in a variety of biomedical applications as oxygen carriers. We have used triblock copolymer Pluronic® F127 to modify the rheology of PFC-based microemulsions, we have been able to form thermoreversible PFOB (perfluorooctyl bromide)-based gels, and have investigated the phase stability, rheology, microstructure, interactions, and gelation mechanism using scattering, rheometry, and microscopy. Finally, we attempted to use these data to understand the relationship between rheology and structure in soft attractive colloids.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.7275/1264927
Recommended Citation
Pan, Xiaoming, "Water-in-Oil Microemulsions: Counterion Effects in AOT Systems and New Fluorocarbon-based Microemulsion Gels" (2010). Open Access Dissertations. 184.
https://doi.org/10.7275/1264927
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/open_access_dissertations/184