Abstract
Emulsions stabilized through the adsorption of colloidal particles at the liquid-liquid interface have been of interest in a wide variety of applications, ranging from pharmaceutical or food products to templates for the preparation of new materials. In this thesis, oil-in-water (O/W) and water-in-oil (W/O) emulsions are efficiently stabilized using colloidal inorganic particles (graphene oxide (GO) and hexagonal boron nitride nanosheets (h-BNNS)). The adsorption of particles to the oil-water interface is induced by adjusting the particle wetting behavior in the liquid media. Two types of emulsions, O/W and W/O are formed by using two-dimensional materials possessing different hydrophilic behaviors. The conditions required to reach the most stable emulsion using two different types of particles at different formulations are investigated. The final microstructures of the mixtures are tailored by adjusting the initial composition of emulsion. The use of high concentration of particles leads to enhanced stability of particles-stabilized emulsions. h-BNNS based emulsions were reported in this work for the first time and their behavior was deeply investigated. Furthermore, a novel green approach to obtain polyvinyl alcohol (PVA)-based porous membranes was reported. In this case, the addition of PVA to the emulsion increases its long term stability and allows its shaping using conventional technologies such as casting. The polymer composites obtained from emulsions stabilized with inorganic particles exhibit microporosity, showing typical pore dimensions of 0.19 ± 0.03 µm or 1.1 ± 0.3 µm depending on the curing time. These obtained porous membranes display good performance in water permeability and particle rejection. Membranes displaying a pore size about 1.1 µm showed water permeability about 2000 L/h m2 bar, and a rejection rate of 86 % with particles of the same size than the pores.