Contact: Dr. Anna Musyanovych, anna.musyanovych@imm.fraunhofer.de
One of the great benefits of encapsulation technology is that it enables protection, targeting, and improvement of the reactive functions of encapsulated compounds. Although numerous techniques are available to encapsulate active agents, one of the major challenges remaining in micro- and nanoencapsulation is to achieve a reproducible and constant product quality, especially at the industrial scale. This is valid - with gradations - to all fields of application, such as coatings, cosmetics, agriculture, food and medicine.
Emulsion-based encapsulation technology is a versatile process for pro-ducing a wide range of functional polymeric micro- and nanocapsules from various synthetic and natural monomers or polymers.
At Fraunhofer IMM, we have developed and are successfully applying microprocess engineering and continuous processing for the encapsulation of hydrophilic / hydrophobic liquids and dispersions of inorganic nanoparticles. Capsules with an average size be-tween 50 nm and 1-20 µm with the customized properties can reliably be obtained in a continuous flow.