Rod-like xylan nanocrystals as stabilizer towards fabricating oil-in-water pickering emulsions

Abstract

Xylan nanocrystals (XyNCs) have attracted increasing attention recently because this kind of polysaccharide nanocrystals is fabricated via the ‘bottom-up’ way, instead of the ‘top-down’ way. As compared to the other polysaccharide nanocrystals, the studies on the applications of XyNCs are limited yet, especially on developing the emulsions stabilized with XyNCs. The reported studies on this new type of Pickering emulsions mainly focused on using plate-like XyNCs as stabilizer. In this work, rod-like XyNCs were prepared for stabilizing emulsions. The results disclose that the rod-like XyNCs have superior emulsifying ability to the olive oil-in-water emulsions. The rheological responses are closely related to the XyNC loading-dependent morphological evolution. Therefore, the catastrophic viscoelasticity during the ramp shear flow and thixotropic cycles can be used as the probe to evaluate the interfacial stabilization mechanism, in this way to prepare the emulsions with optimized XyNC loadings. This work proposes an interesting approach of formulating XyNC-stabilized emulsions, and also provides useful information on diversifying applications of xylan-based nanomaterials.