A rotating disk electrokinetic method for characterizing polyelectrolyte pharmaceutical gels

Abstract

Charge groups in polyelectrolyte gels can affect the entrapment and release of ionic drugs as well as influencing the stability of colloidal and nanoparticulate drug delivery systems. An accurate knowledge of gel charge properties is therefore important to the understanding and design of such drug delivery systems. Existing rotating disk method for quantifying the surface potential of flat surfaces is based on the classical electrokinetic model that neglects the effect of surface conductivity and is therefore only applicable to ion-impenetrable hard surfaces. This classical electrokinetic model would be inaccurate for polyelectrolyte gel systems involving ion-penetrable charged layers or “soft” surfaces. In this study, we developed a new rotating disk model for characterizing charge properties of ion penetrable soft surfaces and tested it on polyvinyl alcohol (PVA)/polyacrylic acid (PAA), gelatin, and gelatin/PAA polyelectrolyte gels. In addition to classical electrokinetic parameters, the contribution of surface conductivity known to be very significant for soft and ion-penetrable gel surfaces has been taken into account in this new rotating disk model. Based on this new approach, two rotating gel disks of different radius but with identical gel composition and preparation procedures were employed for determining the gel surface potential and density of fixed charge groups. A comparison of the resulting data with that obtained from existing rotating disk model ignoring the surface conductivity reveals a significant underestimation of the gel surface potential and the density of fixed charge groups by the ion-impenetrable hard surface approach. Our results thus confirm that the contribution of surface conductivity is significant in the electrokinetic characterization of polyelectrolyte gels that can be evaluated with our new rotating disk model.