I am working on very stable emulsions. I used many techniques e.g. acidification, centrifugation, dilution, pH balance, COD, filter paper evaporation, and UV spectrophotometry but was unable to find the accurate results.
How about distill your emulsion samples with p-xylene? When the oil/water mixtures distill with p-xylene, water and p-xylene would reach their azeotropic point and distilled out together. Our group has used this method to measure the moisture content in bio-oil. There should be more details in the ASTM standard method, ASTM D95-99: Standard Test Method for Water in Petroleum Products and Bituminous Materials by Distillation. Hope this helps :)
You can do it simply by image processing! You need to dye one of the phases and take microscopic images. Then you should process this images and count the oli droplets and the water droplets! There are also some software on the web that you can use for processing!
Moreover, you can do a size analysis if there is a significant difference between the size of your oil droplets and the water droplets!
@Wan-Ting Chen and Homa Izadi....Thanks a lot for your valuable reply.
you own equipment droplet size?
if it comes to model systems, will need some surfactant
Dear Parsanta,
first of all you should know it from material balance of preparation and maybe observing gravimetrical loss through evaporation.
For routine analysis why not use the basic Karl-Fischer method???
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