Wednesday, November 7, 2007 - 12:30 PM
418a

Fluorocarbon-Based Microemulsion Gels With Triblock Copolymers

Xiaoming Pan and Surita R. Bhatia. Chemical Engineering, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 686 North Pleasant Street, Amherst, MA 01003-9303

Fluorocarbon has many unusual properties, such as stability, high gas solubility, high fluidity, etc. Most of them are stable and inert chemically and biologically, making them compatible broadly in biomedical and industrial application, like blood substitutes and blood oxygenation. Perfluorooctylbromide(PFOB) can enhance the tumor echogenicity so it has been popularly used as a contrast material for CT, MRI and ultrasound imaging, especially for hepatosplenography and tumor-imaging. PFOB emulsions were also used for oxygen carriers in cell culture like bio-artificial liver support system. Upon the requirements of bioengineering and biomedical research, the control over structure and rheology properties of the PFOB products is fundamentally important. In this work stable elastic perfluorocarbon-based microemulsion gels were formed by mixing PFOB, water, fluorinated surfactant Zonyl FSO-100, and triblock copolymer Pluronic F127. The gels were investigated in terms of phase stability, rheology, and structure. The behaviors in phase stability investigation were in agreement with rheological properties. Thermosensitivity and thermoreversibility were found in these systems. Most of the formed gels can switch from transparent to cloudy back and forth within a certain range of temperature. The rheological properties of gels can be tuned by composition and temperature. SAXS and confocal microcopy observations suggest a hexagonally close-packed structure with microemulsion droplets which are linked together by Pluronic F127 chains.