The Effect of Particle Shell on Cooling Rates in Oil-in-Oil Magnetic Pickering Emulsions.

Abstract

Pickering emulsions (particle-stabilized emulsions) are usually considered because of their unique properties compared to surfactant-stabilized emulsions including better stability against emulsion aging. However, the interesting feature of particle-stabilized emulsions could be revealed during their magnetic heating. When magnetic particles constitute a shell around droplets and the sample is placed in an alternating magnetic field, a temperature increase appears due to energy dissipation from magnetic relaxation and hysteresis within magnetic particles. We hypothesize that the solidity of the magnetic particle shell around droplets can influence the process of heat transfer from inside the droplet to the surrounding medium. In this way, particle-stabilized emulsions can be considered as materials with changeable heat transfer. We investigated macroscopically heating and cooling of oil-in-oil magnetic Pickering emulsions with merely packed particle layers and these with a stable particle shell. The change in stability of the shell was obtained here by using the coalescence of droplets under the electric field. The results from calorimetric measurements show that the presence of a stable particle shell caused a slower temperature decrease in samples, especially for lower intensities of the magnetic field. The retarded heat transfer from magnetic Pickering droplets can be utilized in further potential applications where delayed heat transfer is desirable.