A new family of urea-based low molecular-weight organogelators for environmental remediation: the influence of structure.

Gelation processes grant access to a wealth of soft materials with tailorable properties, in applications as diverse as environmental remediation, biomedicine and electronics. Several classes of self-assembling gelators have been studied and employ non-covalent bonds to direct assembly, but recently attention has come to focus on how the overall shape of the gelator molecule impacts its gelation. Here we study a new sub-family of low molecular weight organogelators and explore how steric rearrangement influences their gelation. The gels produced are characterised with X-ray diffraction and small-angle neutron scattering (SANS) to probe their ex situ and in situ gelation mechanisms. The best examples were then tested for environmental remediation applications, gelling petrol and oils in the presence of water and salts.

The effect of colloidal aggregates on fat crystal networks.

We investigate the role of a colloidal model system in the crystallization and network formation of lipids. This system consists of fractal fumed silica aggregates. We look at the influence of different solid fat concentrations and fumed silica concentrations on the resulting gel network. Oscillatory rheology shows that the addition of silica to fat-in-oil gels does not significantly affect the magnitude of the storage modulus within the linear viscoelastic region. Interestingly, the range of this region is increased. Differential scanning calorimetry shows that the presence of silica leads to slightly earlier crystallization, though no significant effect on the melting profile of the formed network is found. Based on these observations, we propose that composite gel network structures have been formed. These results show that we have created reduced solid fat alternatives with similar rheological behaviour and thermal properties as the full-fat systems through the addition of colloidal silica.