Rotating Membrane Emulsification for Producing Single and Multiple Emulsions

Abstract

Membrane emulsification is a technique utilising a novel concept of generating droplet ‘drop by drop’ to produce emulsions. The technique has several distinctive advantages over the conventional emulsification techniques.This paper concerns on the development of membrane emulsification (Rotating Membrane Reactor, RMR) which utilizes rotating tubular membrane to initiate droplet detachments. The RMR uses a rotating stainless steel tubular membrane with laser drilled pores (100 μm pore diameter) and a syringe pump to drive the dispersed phase through the membrane at a given flow rate. O/W formulations were prepared with low viscosity of paraffin wax, two types of emulsifiers, different membrane rotation rate and dispersed phase flow rate. The emulsion droplets exhibited a coefficient of variation of 9% and 81μm droplet size. In this research, the pore size/droplet size ratio could achieve 0.8. This value was below than other membrane emulsification processes. The effects of principal system operating parameters on both the average droplet diameter and droplet uniformity were discussed. In addition, a multiple (W/O/W) emulsion formulation was investigated as well.