High-pressure homogenisation is a commonly used technique to produce emulsions with droplets in the micro to nano scale. Due to the flow field in the homogenizer, stresses are transferred to the interface between droplets and continuous phase. Cohesive forces within droplets interact with external stresses. To exceed the cohesive forces, high process pressures are necessary, which might cause a complex flow pattern and large flow velocities. Additionally, the pressure drop can induce cavitation. Inline measurements are a challenge, but necessary to understand droplet break-up in a high-pressure homogenizer. Recently, different optical methods have been used to investigate the flow conditions as well as the droplet deformation and break-up in high-pressure homogenisation, such as high speed imaging, particle and micro particle image velocimetry. In this review, those optical measuring methods are considered critically in their applications and limitations, achievable results and further developments.Keywords: high-pressure homogenisation; optical measurement methods; flow field characterisation; droplet break-up; emulsification
MotivationHigh-pressure homogenisation (HPH) is widely used in chemical, pharmaceutical and food industry to produce emulsions with desired properties. Properties of emulsions, like mouth feel, colour, flow behaviour, or stability, depend strongly on their microstructure and thus on the droplet size distribution of the emulsion [1]. However, tailor-made adjustments of the droplet size distribution in emulsions is still challenging due to complexity of interactions of the process conditions and the properties of the formulation. In order to decrease the droplet size distributions, the volume-related energy density E v is increased, most often by increasing the pressure drop ∆p in the disruption unit [2]. Unfortunately, this might also lead to cavitation and cavitation-induced wear at the devices. A change in the homogeniser disruption unit design may also improve droplet breakup. As an example, Microfluidics ® offers so-called T-or Z-shaped disruption units which allow droplet size reduction well below <1 µm for specific formulations. Other manufacturers merchandise specific "energy-efficient" disruption units. Even when these disruption units work fine with some formulations, they do not with others. A deep understanding in the influence of disruption unit design and process parameters on flow patterns and resulting droplet sizes is still missing.One possibility to describe the influence of process conditions, and/or product recipe on resulting droplet sizes is to measure the average droplet size or the droplet size distribution (DSD) of the emulsion after homogenisation. Thus, the influence of different parameters like pressure drop [2][3][4][5], geometry of the device [2,6-9], or formulation [10][11][12][13] can be related to homogenisation efficiency, which allows some mechanistic insight into the high-pressure homogenisation process. However, offline measurements always repre...