I am working with insect pheromone and I want to disperse the mesoporous TiO2, SiO2, ZnO and zeolite nano particles in hexane organic solvent for slow release of pheromone. Anybody having experience, please help me.
All the oxide nanoparticles you mentioned contain surface hydroxyl groups and tend to aggregate fast in water or aqueous suspensions. In hexane they may be give reasonably stable suspensions but it depends upon the particle size. Use of very small quantity of organic solvent soluble stabilizers will help. But you should chose them carefully and their size should be bigger than the pore diameter so that they will not enter the pores and remain on the surface of the particles minimizing particle-particle interactions and increasing stability of the dispersion.
By the way you would like to use hexane just for loading of the pheromone OR you intend to use dispersion of pheromone loaded nanoparticles in hexane in real applications ? As hexane is toxic may be good solvent for loading of pheromones and then you can chose other solvent such as ethanol (water miscible and non toxic) for preparing the dispersion/suspension of pheromone loaded particles.
Hi,
Remember if your formulation will be the pheromone dissolved in hexane and you add the porous particles to this solution. Some of the pheromone will enter the pores and this is called as loading of the particles and some quantity of the pheromone will remain in the solution. So you have to separate your particles from the solution may be by centrifugation and then determine the actual loading. Because if you want a slow or controlled release you should be interested in the pheromone loaded inside the pores on the particles. Then you can make a fresh suspension of the pheromone loaded particles in desired solvent (not necessary hexane now) in which the pheromone is soluble and determine the quantitative release with time. I hope this will help.
Good luck.
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