Effects of process parameters on capsule size and shape in the centrifugal encapsulation technology: Parametric study...

Microencapsulation technologies have experienced much growth over the past decades and are commonly used for food, cosmetic, pharmaceutical and biomedical applications. Certain application fields impose stricter requirements on the polymer capsules. In many biomedical applications including bioencapsulation, cell therapy and drug delivery applications, capsules are required to have a controlled shape and size, as well as a defined mechanical stability and porosity. This data article reports the alginate capsule production using common centrifugal technology, which enables the production of microcapsules with highly viscous biopolymers. We describe the experimental data generated in a parametric study, where the main control parameters of the centrifugal encapsulation system (alginate viscosity, rotating speed, nozzle diameter, collecting distance) were varied. The geometric properties of the produced hydrogel capsules were analysed by microscope photography and image processing. The dataset presented here contains the experimental data, the raw capsule images, the analysis scripts, the analysed images, and tables with extracted geometric information. All extracted data was compiled into a table containing geometric properties of more than 50000 analysed capsules. These data allow (i) to reproduce quickly the encapsulation experiments and be able to choose in a straight-forward manner the combination of parameters needed in order to generate capsules with desired properties; (ii) to create more general phase diagrams of the centrifugal encapsulation technology which can be widely used for prediction and/or parameter selection; (iii) to analyse more thoroughly the sensitivity of capsule properties to given stages of the encapsulation process. The research article on these data [1] was published in the journal Colloids and Surfaces A: Physicochemical and Engineering Aspect, with the title: Three-dimensional phase diagram for the centrifugal Calcium-alginate microcapsules production technology.