TURBISCAN MA 2000: multiple light scattering measurement for concentrated emulsion and suspension instability analysis

Emulsion or suspension destabilisation often results from coalescence or particle aggregation (flocculation) leading to particle migration (creaming or sedimentation). Creaming and sedimentation are often considered as reversible, while coalescence and flocculation spell disaster for the formulator. Thus, it is of prime importance to detect coalescence or cluster formation at an early stage to shorten the ageing tests and to improve the formulations. This work mainly concerns the independent and anisotropic scattering of light from an emulsion or suspension in a cylindrical glass measurement cell, in relation with the optical analyser TURBISCAN MA 2000. The propagation of light through a concentrated dispersion can be used to characterise the system physico-chemical stability. Indeed, photons undergo many scattering events in an optically thick dispersion before escaping the medium and entering a receiver aperture. Multiple scattering thus contributes significantly to the transmitted and backscattered flux measured by TURBISCAN MA 2000. We present statistical models and numerical simulations for the radiative transfer in a suspension (plane or cylindrical measurement cells) only involving the photon mean path length, the asymmetry factor and the geometry of the light receivers. We further have developed an imaging method with high grey level resolution for the visualisation and the analysis of the surface flux in the backscattered spot light. We compare the results from physical models and numerical simulations with the experiments performed with the imaging method and the optical analyser TURBISCAN MA 2000 for latex beads suspensions (variable size and particle volume fraction). We then present a few examples of concentrated emulsion and suspension instability analysis with TURBISCAN 2000. It is shown that the instrument is able to characterise particle or aggregate size variation and particle/aggregate migration and to detect these phenomena much more earlier than the operator’s naked eye, especially for concentrated and optically thick media.