Compositional ripening in water-in-oil systems

One approach to achieve low calorie foods is to substitute regions of high calorie content with water droplets. Such water-in-oil emulsion systems are naturally unstable due to coalescence and Ostwald ripening. These effects can be reduced, for example, via an interfacial layer of solid particles. In complex food systems consisting of multiple species of dispersed phases, compositional ripening may also occur in which the water undergoes mass transfer to regions filled with other less soluble species. In this seminar I will present my current PhD work of creating a PMMA/dodecane/sugar model emulsion to initially explore compositional ripening. I will then explain my current pipeline in place for tracking the properties of individual water droplets from confocal videos and present the results. Finally, I will present my ongoing and future work. From a computational point of view, examining the application of machine learning to better understand why certain droplets undergo compositional ripening more than others. Experimentally, investigating aspects of the model system, such as the water-oil interface, that can be modified to better resemble a food system.