Thermodynamic Equilibrium of Domains in a Two-component Langmuir Monolayer, Y. Hu, K. Meleson, and J. Israelachvili, Biophys. J., (2006)
Dense Cluster Formation during Aggregation and Gelation of Attractive Slippery Nanoemulsion Droplets, J. N. Wilking, S. M. Graves, C. B. Chang, K. Meleson, M. Y. Lin, and T. G. Mason,, Phys Rev Lett, 96, (2006)
Structure of Concentrated Nanoemulsions, S. Graves, K. Meleson, J. Wilking, M. Y. Lin, and T. G. Mason, J. Chem. Phys., 122, (2005)
Formation of Concentrated Nanoemulsions by Extreme Shear, K. Meleson, S. Graves, and T. Mason, Soft Mater., 2, (2004)
Research Interests
I am primarily interested in formulations of nanoemulsions:
metastable heterogeneous mixtures of one immiscible liquid
phase dispersed in another immiscible liquid in the form of
droplets with radii less than 100 nm. Emulsions are ubiquitous
in our everyday lives-from food products and cosmetics to oil
recovery and pharmaceuticals. Typical emulsions are composed of
oil and water with a surfactant to stabilize the system.
The composition and preparation govern the physical characteristics
such as droplet size, optical properties, applications, and rheological behavior.
Some interesting things we have investigated are the effects of shear rate,
oil volume fraction, and surfactant concentration on the droplet size of
an emulsion. By using extreme shear and a high concentration of
sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS), we were able to produce
relatively monodisperse nanoemulsions with an average
droplet radius of about 15 nm.