Influence of nanoscale particle roughness on the stability of Pickering emulsions

The wetting behavior of solid surfaces can be altered dramatically by introducing surface roughness on the nanometer scale. Some of nature's most fascinating wetting phenomena are associated with surface roughness; they have inspired both fundamental research and the adoption of surface roughness as a design parameter for man-made functional coatings. So far the attention has focused primarily on macroscopic surfaces, but one should expect the wetting properties of colloidal particles to be strongly affected by roughness, too. Particle wettability, in turn, is a key parameter for the adsorption of particles at liquid interfaces and for the industrially important use of particles as emulsion stabilizers; yet, the consequence of particle roughness for emulsion stability remains poorly understood. In order to investigate the matter systematically, we have developed a surface treatment, applicable to micrometer-sized particles and macroscopic surfaces alike, that produces surface coatings with finely tunable nanoscale roughness and identical surface chemistry. Coatings with different degrees of roughness were characterized with regard to their morphology, charging, and wetting properties, and the results were correlated with the stability of emulsions prepared with coated particles of different roughness. We find that the maximum capillary pressure, a metric of the emulsions' resistance to droplet coalescence, varies significantly and in a nonmonotonic fashion with particle roughness. Surface topography and contact angle hysteresis suggest that particle roughness benefits the stability of our emulsions as long as wetting occurs homogeneously (Wenzel regime), whereas the transition toward heterogeneous wetting (Cassie-Baxter regime) is associated with a loss of stability.