Industrially Meaningful Production of Uniform Spherical Particles for Controlled and Targeted Delivery Using Membrane Emulsification

Production of larger droplets of controlled diameter is becoming increasingly popular. Those droplets after additional treatment can be turned into particles and applied in industries as food and flavour encapsulates, controlled release depots under the skin, medical diagnostic particles, high value fillers, electronic ink capsules, ion exchange resins. Conventional devices for preparing emulsions apply more energy than needed to produce droplets, leading to droplets with a wide size distribution and such devices are not suitable if temperature/sheer sensitive compounds should be encapsulated.

Membrane emulsification (ME) is a dispersion process to produce monosized droplets of one liquid phase (e.g. oil) in a second immiscible liquid phase (e.g. water) using low energy per unit volume where the shear stress applied on the membrane surface influences the droplet size. A new ME technique (dispersion cell [1] [2], torsional [3], and “cross-flow” ME [4,5]) developed at Micropore Technologies Ltd. UK in collaboration with Loughborough University were introduced for generating the shear on the membrane surface providing the possibility to generate larger droplets without risk of breakage with possibility for scaling up. Using these techniques, it is possible to generate highly uniform drops/particles between 10 and 1000 µm with the production volume capacity of up to 1500kg/hr using the “cross-flow” system. At the talk the formulation strategy when using membrane emulsification will be covered as peer Fig.1.

Fig. 1 Some particles produced up to date

 

Keywords: Membrane Emulsification, Spherical Particles, Controlled Release, Silica, PLGA,

References

[1] Morelli, S., Holdich, R.G. and Dragosavac, M.M., 2017. Microparticles for cell encapsulation and colonic delivery produced by membrane emulsification. Journal of membrane science, 524, pp.377-388.

[2] Pu, X., Wolf, B. and Dragosavac, M., 2019. Generation of magnesium enriched water-in-oil-in-water food emulsions by stirred cell membrane emulsification. Journal of Food Engineering, 247, pp.178-187.

[3] Imbrogno, A., Dragosavac, M.M., Piacentini, E., Vladisavljević, G.T., Holdich, R.G. and Giorno, L., 2015. Polycaprolactone multicore-matrix particle for the simultaneous encapsulation of hydrophilic and hydrophobic compounds produced by membrane emulsification and solvent diffusion processes. Colloids and Surfaces B: Biointerfaces, 135, pp.116-125.

[4] Holdich, R., Dragosavac, M., Williams, B. and Trotter, S., 2020. High throughput membrane emulsification using a single‐pass annular flow crossflow membrane. AIChE Journal, 66(6), p.e16958.

[5] Miramontes-Subillaga, D., Heinert, S., Weissbrodt, J. and Dragosavac, M., Manufacturing nearly monodispersed complex coacervate microcapsules by membrane emulsification and spray drying. Food Hydrocolloids 153 (2024) 109953.

Date

oct. 25 2024
Expired!

Time

12:00 - 13:00

Location

Sala de Graus, ETSEQ
ETSEQ

Speaker

  • Marijana Dragosavac
    Marijana Dragosavac
    Loughborough University, UK

    Marijana Dragosavac graduated with an MEng degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Novi Sad (Serbia). She worked for a Danish company Aker Kvaerner (Vapour Recovery Systems) and a Serbian engineering company Worldtech both in the oil and gas industry before starting an MSc at the Department of Chemical Engineering in Serbia. This was followed by her work as a Teaching and Research Assistant at the same Chemical Engineering Department in Serbia. Marijana moved to the United Kingdom to start a PhD on Particle formulation using membrane emulsification at Loughborough University. In 2011 she finished her PhD and for a year working as a Knowledge Transfer Associate for Micropore Technologies Ltd., Hatton, UK. In 2012 Marijana was appointed to a lectureship in Chemical Engineering here at Loughborough University and became a Senior Lecturer in 2017.