Understanding Pickering Emulsions Using Multi-Scale Simulations

Pickering emulsions are becoming extremely popular in the academic community. However, few applications benefit from such interesting systems. We argue that better understanding their fundamental properties, especially related to their stability, will enable a host of practical applications. The stability of Pickering emulsions is related to structural and dynamical properties of interfacial nanoparticles. Our group has investigated such properties by means of multi-scale simulations (from atomistic to coarse-grained, to phenomenological). We considered several nanoparticle types, including spherical and elliptical, Janus or homogeneous with different amounts of hydrophilic/hydrophobic surface groups. We focus on (a) the effect of particle properties on self-assembled aggregates structure, and (b) systems of different composition. For a given system composition, we investigate the effect of increasing nanoparticle density. We will present here a survey of our recent results, quantified in terms of interfacial tension reduction, radial distribution function, order parameters, contact angle, and self-diffusion coefficient, etc. The goal is to identify properties that could be tested experimentally.