Review on the study of Pickering emulsions: Theory and simulation

Emulsions are mixtures of two or more immiscible liquids, macroscopically homogeneous in appearance. They result from the dispersion in the form of spherical drops, with a diameter varying from 0.1 to a few tens of micrometers, from one of the liquids (called the dispersed phase) to the second (called the continuous phase). The emulsions have been used in several applications such as food, pharmaceutical, cosmetics and petroleum industries. Generally the emulsions are metastable thanks to reversible and irreversible phenomena, such as coalescence, the addition of surfactants accumulates at the interface between the two liquids, stabilizing the emulsion kinetically. Since some of these traditional emulsifiers are toxic to the environment and harmful to consumers, an alternative would be to form emulsions stabilized by a shell of charged solid particles, creates a rigid barrier against coalescence with a strong adsorption, these emulsions are called Pickering emulsion. To understand the interactions and distribution of droplets, and to provide an understanding of the stability of Pickering emulsions, from evaluating structural and thermodynamic quantities according to the problem parameters from molecular dynamics simulations, in this respect we consider these emulsions as a colloidal suspension. We will choose the Sogami-Ise pair potential which is in good agreement with the experimental.