A study of the microstructure of four-component sucrose ester microemulsions by SAXS and NMR☆

Sucrose esters form a class of surfactants with the important properties of being biodegradable, non-toxic and capable of forming temperature-insensitive microemulsions. Such microemulsions would be expected to suit a variety of food-based and pharmaceutical applications; however to date little is known about their structure and stability. In this study, the Winsor IV microemulsion systems composed of sucrose esters (SE)/1-butanol/water and oils such as n-dodecane, n-hexadecane and medium chain triglyceride (MCT), have been investigated using small angle X-ray scattering (SAXS), pulsed gradient spin echo (PGSE) NMR and viscosity measurements. The SAXS results for the sucrose monostearate (S1570) system at SE/MCT/1-butanol=1.5:1.1 clearly indicate that the periodicity d increases with increase in water content and is not sensitive to the nature of the oil. From the amphiphilicity factor, fa, and the correlation length, ξ, one can conclude that the n-dodecane-based microemulsion system is the most ordered. Microstructure investigation by PGSE NMR gives evidence of structural changes as the water content in the system increases. The oil self-diffusion remains unchanged when MCT serves as the oil phase. However, when the oil is paraffinic in nature (n-dodecane and n-hexadecane) the self-diffusion coefficient indicates participation of the oil molecules at the interface. Surfactant self-diffusion is only weakly affected by the water content. The shorter chain oils (n-dodecane and MCT) solubilize a maximum of 40 and 47 wt.% of water and cannot invert, while the long chain paraffinic (n-hexadecane-based system) inverts into an O/W microemulsion. The viscosity of these microemulsions decreases with increasing water content. The absence of a yield stress in any of the samples studied, together with the linearity of the flow curves, is evidence that there are no relaxation processes in these microemulsions which show a non-Newtonian flow behavior.

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