Membrane spherical liquid

Emulsion Liquid Membranes. Emulsion liquid membranes have been modeled by numerous researchers. Chan and Lee (77) reviewed the various models. The simplest representation characterizes the emulsion globule (membrane phase) as a spherical shell of constant thickness surrounding a single Internal phase droplet. This representation Is equivalent to assuming that the membrane and internal phase are well mixed. In practice, this Is usually a poor assumption. 

Spherical liquid membranes consist, in simplest terms, of an emulsion suspended in a liquid that does not destroy the emulsion. In a typical application, small droplets of aqueous solution are encapsulated in a thin-film oil this emulsion is then suspended in another aqueous solution. Alternatively, small droplets of oil can be emulsified with water and the emulsion suspended in oil. In the first case, the oil phase is the liquid membrane in the second case, the water is the Uquid membrane. A typical droplet might be about 100 p,m in diameter. These spherical liquid membrane systems have many potential medical applications in the emergency treatment of drug overdoses and for oxygenating the blood system. Spherical liquid membranes may be applied in resource recovery and water purification, as encapsulated cells as well as liquid membrane encapsulated enzymes [331). 

Lyotropic liquid crystals are obtained when an appropriate concentration of a material is dissolved in some solvent. The most common systems are those formed by water and amphiphilic molecules (molecules that possess a hydrophilic part that interacts strongly with water and a hydrophobic part that is water insoluble) such as soaps, detergents, and lipids. Here the most important variable controlling the existence of the liquid crystalline phase is the amount of solvent (or concentration). There are quite a number of phases observed in such water-amphiphilic systems, as the composition and temperature are varied some appear as spherical micelles, and others possess ordered structures with one-, two-, or three-dimensional positional order. Examples of these kinds of molecules are soaps (Fig. 1.8) and various phospholipids like those present in cell membranes. Lyotropic liquid crystals are of interest in biological studies. ... 

The shape of steady-state voltammograms depends strongly on the geometry of the microhole [13,14], Wilke and Zerihun presented a model to describe diffusion-controlled IT through a microhole [15], In that model, a cylindrical microhole is assumed to be filled with the organic phase, so that a planar liquid-liquid interface is located at the aqueous phase side of the membrane. Assuming that the diffusion is linear inside the cylindrical pore and spherical outside [Fig. 2(a)], the expression for the steady-state IT voltammo-gram is... 

FIG. 7 Structures of various liquid-crystalline phases of membrane lipids. (A) Normal hexagonal phase (Hi) (B) lamellar phase (C) inverted hexagonal phase (Hu). Cubic phases consisting of (D) spherical, (E) rod-shaped, and (F) lamellar units. The hydrocarbon regions are shaded and the hydrophilic regions are white. (Reprinted by permission from Ref. 11, copyright 1984, Kluwer Academic Publishers.)... 

The surface molecules are under a different force field from the molecules in the bulk phase or the gas phase. These forces are called surface forces. A liquid surface behaves like a stretched elastic membrane in that it tends to contract. This action arises from the observation that, when one empties a beaker with a liquid, the liquid breaks up into spherical drops. This phenomenon indicates that drops are being created under some forces that must be present at the surface of the newly formed interface. These surface forces become even more important when a liquid is in contact with a solid (such as ground-water oil reservoir). The flow of liquid (e.g., water or oil) through small pores underground is mainly governed by capillary forces. Capillary forces are found to play a very dominant role in many systems, which will be described later. Thus, the interaction between liquid and any solid will form curved surface that, being different from a planar fluid surface, initiates the capillary forces. 

It is evident that in many situations the reaction rate will be directly proportional to the surface area between phases whenever mass transfer hmits reaction rates. In some situations we provide a fixed area by using solid particles of a given size or by membrane reactors in which a fixed wall separates phases Ifom each other. Here we distinguish planar walls and parallel sheets of sohd membranes, tubes and tube bundles, and spherical solid or liquid membranes. These are three-, two-, and one-dimensional phase boundaries, respectively. 

Transport in a microporous biomedical membrane is described in Fig. 11. Membranes consist of cylindrical liquid-filled pores of length l and radius rp with spherical solute molecules of radius rs diffusing through the pores. The solute... 

Closed bilayer aggregates, formed from phospholipids (liposomes) or from surfactants (vesicles), represent one of the most sophisticated models of the biological membrane [55-58, 69, 72, 293]. Swelling of thin lipid (or surfactant) films in water results in the formation of onion-like, 1000- to 8000-A-diameter multilamellar vesicles (MLVs). Sonication of MLVs above the temperature at which they are transformed from a gel into a liquid (phase-transition temperature) leads to the formation of fairly uniform, small (300- to 600-A-diameter) unilamellar vesicles (SUVs Fig. 34). Surfactant vesicles can be considered to be spherical bags with diameters of a few hundred A and thickness of about 50 A. Typically, each vesicle contains 80,000-100,000 surfactant molecules. 

A molecule at the surface is attracted more strongly from below because the molecules of the gas are separated much more widely, and the attraction is inversely proportional to the distance between molecules. This imbalance of forces creates a membrane-like surface. It causes a liquid to tend toward a minimum surface area. For instance, a drop of water falling through air tends to be spherical since a sphere has the minimum surface-to-volume ratio. 

The sol-gel process involves the transition of a system from a liquid "sol" (mostly colloidal) into a solid "gel" phase (11). By applying this methodology, it is possible to fabricate ceramic or glass materials in a wide variety of forms ultrafine or spherical-shaped powders, thin film coatings, ceramic fibers, microporous inorganic membranes, monolithic ceramics and glasses, or extremely porous aerogel materials. 

Fig. 3. Heat production is an important consideration for devices using electric fields in the liquid near cells. This figure shows the theoretical distribution of heat production in and around a spherical cell at the centre of a quadrupole electrode chamber in a solution of low electrical conductivity (top) and high conductivity (bottom). The heat production is given by gE2 where g is the conductivity of the solution or cell component and E is the (local) electric field strength. The contour interval is 7% of the maximum in each case. The cell is modelled as an electrically conductive sphere enveloped by an insulating but capacitive membrane.

An analytical elastic membrane model was developed by Feng and Yang (1973) to model the compression of an inflated, non-linear elastic, spherical membrane between two parallel surfaces where the internal contents of the cell were taken to be a gas. This model was extended by Lardner and Pujara (1980) to represent the interior of the cell as an incompressible liquid. This latter assumption obviously makes the model more representative of biological cells. Importantly, this model also does not assume that the cell wall tensions are isotropic. The model is based on a choice of cell wall material constitutive relationships (e.g., linear-elastic, Mooney-Rivlin) and governing equations, which link the constitutive equations to the geometry of the cell during compression. 

FIG. 1. Schematic representation of the particle under consideration. Xq and d are, respectively, the scaled size of the rigid core of a particle and the scaled thickness of membrane, and i//c and ij/d are, respectively, the scaled electrical potentials at the core-membrane interface and at membrane-liquid interface, (a) planar particle (b) cylindrical and spherical particles. 

An explanation for this gel formation is sought in the phase transition behavior of span 60. At the elevated temperature (60 °C) which exceeds the span 60 membrane phase transition temperature (50 °C) [154], it is assumed that span 60 surfactant molecules are self-assembled to form a liquid crystal phase. The liquid crystal phase stabilizes the water droplets within the oil. However, below the phase transition temperature the gel phase persists and it is likely that the monolayer stabilizing the water collapses and span 60 precipitates within the oil. The span 60 precipitate thus immobilizes the liquid oil to form a gel. Water channels are subsequently formed when the w/o droplets collapse. This explanation is plausible as the aqueous volume marker CF was identified within these elongated water channels and non-spherical aqueous droplets were formed within the gel [153]. These v/w/o systems have been further evaluated as immunological adjuvants. 

An emulsion liquid membrane (ELM) system has been studied for the selective separation of metals. This system is a multiple phase emulsion, water-in-oil-in-water (W/O/W) emulsion. In this system, the metal ions in the external water are moved into the internal water phase, as shown in Fig. 3.4. The property of the ELM system is useful to prepare size-controlled aiKl morphology controlled fine particles such as metals, carbonates/ and oxalates.Rare earth oxalate particles have been prepared using this system, consisting of Span83 (sorbitan sesquioleate) as a surfactant and EHPNA (2-ethyl-hexylphospholic acid mono-2-ethylhexyl ester) as an extractant. In the case of cerium, well-defined and spherical oxalate particles, 20 - 60 nm in size, are obtained. The control of the particle size is feasible by the control of the feed rare earth metal concentration and the size of the internal droplets. Formation of ceria particles are attained by calcination of the oxalate particles at 1073 K, though it brings about some construction of the particles probably caused by carbon dioxide elimination. 

Typical is microencapsulation , a method by which small portions of liquids, particulate solids, or gases are surrounded by a shell (membrane, capsule) to form approximate spherical particles. 

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