Thermogelation of nanoemulsions stabilized by a commercial pea protein isolate: high-pressure homogenization defines gel strength
Name
d4sm00687a.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
7.98 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
d37c8b614ed1a2d79fa4cc1ae4223cc3
Author(s)
Renggli, Damian
Doyle, Patrick S
Date Issued
January 22, 2025
Journal
Soft Matter
Publisher
Royal Society of Chemistry
Citation
Renggli, Damian and Doyle, Patrick S. 2025. "Thermogelation of nanoemulsions stabilized by a commercial pea protein isolate: high-pressure homogenization defines gel strength." Soft Matter, 21 (4).
Version
Final published version
Abstract
The impact of animal-based food production on climate change drives the development of plant-based alternatives. We demonstrate the use of colloidal thermogelation on a real nanoemulsion system to create structured gels that could be of interest for thermo-mechanical processing of next-generation plant-based food applications. We use a commercial pea protein isolate (PPI) without further purification to stabilize a 20 vol% peanut oil-in-water nanoemulsion at pH = 7 by high-pressure homogenization (HPH) and demonstrate the temperature induced gelation behavior of the nanoemulsion as a function of the HPH processing parameters. Bright-field and laser scanning confocal fluorescence microscopy reveals a diverse microstructure of the aqueous PPI dispersions, with a large amount of insoluble protein particles, cell-wall debris particles, and lipid inclusions. Sedimentation of particulates is prevented by HPH treatment and leads to a loss of the dispersion's thermogelation properties. The non-gelling PPI dispersion stabilizes nanoemulsions and the insoluble components of the PPI dispersions persist throughout the HPH processing. We perform a systematic rheological investigation of the effect of HPH processing on thermogelation and demonstrate that the number of HPH passes n and HPH pressure P control the average nanoemulsion droplet size measured by DLS at a 90° scattering angle. We show that the droplet size defines the final gel strength with a strong inverse dependence of the elastic modulus on droplet size. Furthermore, processing can lead to heterogeneously structured gels that yield over a large strain amplitude range.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Chemical Engineering
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1039/d4sm00687a
