Emulsion Science

Book excerpt: Emulsions occur either as end products or during the processing of products in a huge range of areas including the food, agrochemical, pharmaceuticals, paints and oil industries. As end products, emulsions allow to avoid organic solvent in processing hydrophobic coatings. Emulsion technology is a suitable approach to vehicle viscous phases. It is also a remarkable mean of targeting actives or capturing specific species. The range of applications of emulsions progresses and their manufacturing becomes more and more sophisticated. Besides this broad domain of technological interest, emulsions are raising a variety of fundamental questions at the frontier between physic and chem istry. Indeed, as a class of soft colloidal materials, emulsions science is linked to various aspects of these disciplines: phase transitions, surface forces and wetting, metastability and hydrodynamic instabilities, mechanical properties and flow. The aim of this book is to review the main important concepts governing emulsion science. In Chapter 2, repulsive interactions between liquid films are discussed as well as adhesive interaction related to wetting. In Chap ter 3, consequences of weak and strong attractions are presented, related to the well accepted liquid solid transition analogy. In Chapter 4, the basics of both bulk compressibility and shear elasticity are presented, the role of disorder being the most important aspect of the elastic behavior of these soft systems. In Chapter 5 the central question of the emulsion lifetime related to metastability is discussed.