Development of a novel 3-fluid nozzle for spray-dried microencapsulation of quercetin in zein and sodium caseinate

Microencapsulation is a powerful technology for stabilizing compounds of interest to the food industry that are difficult to incorporate into food matrices for a variety of reasons. Microfluidic assembly of microcapsules has recently been studied as a means for producing extremely uniform and small particles, which is beneficial for controlled release applications; however, it is difficult to scale this technology to meet the demands of the food industry. Spray-drying represents a much higher throughput option for microencapsulation, but requires additional processing steps to generate microcapsule suspensions and often suffers from large particle sizes with wide distributions. This study proposes a novel 3-fluid nozzle technology that combines the fluid dynamic principles and single processing step found in microfluidic systems with the high throughput of spray-drying. Zein, the prolamin storage protein from corn, and quercetin, a polyphenolic flavonol compound with numerous health benefits, were chosen as a model system for this study. Zein nanoparticles ranging from 170 – 205 nm in size were successfully generated using a benchtop simulation of the proposed technology, with both total flow rate and initial zein concentration having a significant effect (p < 0.05) on resultant particle size and polydispersity index (PDI). Quercetin was successfully encapsulated in a zein/sodium caseinate system using spray drying with the novel 3-fluid nozzle. Contact time between the two phases for encapsulation was varied but found to have no significant effect on particle size, encapsulation efficiency, or antioxidant capacity; however, the spray-dried powders showed smaller particle sizes and narrow particle size distributions than what is typically seen in spray-drying operations. Encapsulation efficiency of quercetin ranged from 70% to 80%, and samples exhibited around 80% of the antioxidant capacity of an unencapsulated quercetin control sample. The proposed nozzle technology could be useful for numerous encapsulation applications that require the narrower particle size distribution and high throughput for the food industry.

Name thesis:degree_name

M.S.

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Food Science & Human Nutrition

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2021

Author dc:creator

• Kilker, Sean R.

Contributors dc:contributor

• Lee, Youngsoo
• de Mejia, Elvira
• Padua, Graciela W
• Wang, Yi-Cheng

• Zein
• Microencapsulation
• Microfluidics
• Quercetin
• Spray-Drying

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2020 Sean Kilker

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/109339

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/109339