Application
Watch the composition of the emulsion as it forms
Emulsification is judged by what comes out of it — droplet size, stability, texture. What drives all three is composition and how it changes while the phases are being brought together. Sampled at intervals, that trajectory is invisible; measured in a flow cell, it is a curve you can hold a process against.
What an inline composition measurement gives you
- Oil, water and surfactant concentrations as they change through the addition, rather than at the end of it.
- An endpoint defined by a measured composition, not by a fixed mixing time carried over from the last scale.
- Batch-to-batch comparison against a reference trajectory, so a drifting raw material shows up as a different curve.
- Incoming-goods and raw-material release on the same instrument — the check most sites currently send to a lab.
- A record of every batch rather than of the points somebody happened to sample.
What the instrument can and cannot see
The OrionIR® is a transmission flow cell on a recirculation loop or a representative side stream, so what it measures is the chemistry of the material flowing through it. It does not size droplets and it does not replace a particle-size instrument; it tells you what the emulsion is made of and how that composition moves.
The practical limits are the ones published on the specification page: the stream has to flow through a 20 µm path, droplets and particles <15 µm with an inline filter of 15 µm, viscosity below 10,000 cP, and no settled solids. Where a formulation sits outside that, we would rather measure your own samples and tell you before you commit than find out afterwards.
The stages we have resolved
- Surfactant incorporation, as the spectral signature of the added phase appears.
- Onset of emulsification, when the system starts to change state rather than merely mix.
- Endpoint stabilisation, when the spectrum stops changing.
Published as an application note. These are chemical states read directly from the spectrum, not inferred from mixing time or from a physical measurement made afterwards.
Developing or scaling an emulsion process?
Tell us the formulation, the concentration range and the vessel. Where it makes sense we test on your own process samples first.