Researchers at the University of Waterloo have developed a novel technology that accurately encapsulates core materials and could make important contributions to a wide range of industry applications.
Dr. Sushanta Mitra, executive director of the Waterloo Institute for Nanotechnology and professor of mechanical and mechatronics engineering at the University of Waterloo, and team have built a robust prototype with four injection nozzles that can deliver up to 200,000 encapsulated cargo in an hour for use in the nutraceutical, pharmaceutical, food and beverage, cosmetic and personal care industries.
The team is currently working with partners and product manufacturers in the Netherlands to integrate the curing stage with their prototype so the encapsulated cargo could be extracted as individual capsules on demand if needed.
The process, known as a liquid-liquid encapsulation system, introduces a drop of core material (which could be pure liquid or liquid containing suspended functional ingredients) through a nozzle, which impacts on a host bath, containing a floating shell layer on the surface. When a complex interaction of the core material with the shell layer occurs, it creates a stable encapsulation which protects the core material and safeguards it from an aggressive environment enabling a timely release of the cargo material to a targeted area.
"The technology is ultrafast with each encapsulation taking only 50 milliseconds," said Mitra. "This technology is at least 5000 times less energy intensive and it avoids the introduction of any microplastics in the encapsulation process.”
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