Micro-encapsulation

“Making products magical”

For more information, contact us.

■  Innovation, added value and differentiation are key words used by technological development and marketing managers on a daily basis in every company that wants to approach or stay ahead of international competition.

■  Thus, making products intelligent is a major innovation focus of a growing number of industries. We know, for example, that textiles no longer fulfil the sole purpose of clothing, but have one or more added-value and added-perception services. Trend for "health foods" and "health clothes" are currently developing, respectively making it possible to look after one’s health by eating and protect oneself against aggression from insects, bacteria and mites with one's clothes.

■  In the pharmaceutical field, generic drugs are created with innovative galenics, which is giving new life to molecules in the public field. Thus, we can now take an aspirin tablet without water, by letting it melt slowly under the tongue, without a horrible taste having time to invade the palate. Like in the Pharmaceutical field, the Cosmetics field is also looking for more targeted, efficient and intelligent delivery systems.

■  These are magical products; products with the "Wow" effect which, as soon as they appear on the market, make competitive products look sad, bland and very soon without customers. One of the first magical products was carbonless paper, invented by NCR around fifty years ago, which opened the way by applying a micro-encapsulation technique for the first time.

■  These techniques have a number of advantages as they make it possible to protect active components from exterior agents, to increase life span or conservation time, to defer the action of chemical or biological reagents, to hide the properties of an active component and to make pigment charges compatible with a host polymer matrix.

■  Today's processes, whether chemical or mechanical, make it possible to encapsulate or to coat particle shapes of different types (in liquid or solid state or gas) and sizes (from nano to the millimetre).

■  These techniques have multiple applications; they concern the vectorisation of therapeutic molecules; cosmetics, where liposomes close in the main active ingredient, which then releases itself; in the phyto-sanitary field, the action is more targeted on plants; and the speciality chemistry field, for example: solvent-free paints are developed thanks to micro-encapsulation.

■  In plastic transformation, the formulation of technical plastics to obtain new properties is a major theme: the incorporation of polymers into other plastic materials is being studied: olefin co-polymers have been developed as shock modifiers for polyamides and polyesters; in the matrix, a structure consisting of a core and a shell is created, in which the core is rigid (polyamide) and the shell is supple (co-polyolefins). Thus, micro-encapsulation concerns in a direct way vehicle interiors. For military applications, material stealth can be obtained by grafting on the structure polymers charged with carbon black.

■  In the food sector, and more particularly in the field of supplementation and flavouring, micro-encapsulation is at the root of a number of developments making it possible to improve the performance of active substances such as vitamins, essential fatty acids or flavours. Lastly, in the field of textiles, micro-encapsulation makes it possible to give the fibre a special function; thus, we have the example of shirts that always smell nice.

■  All of these examples show that the solutions are already there, but the technology is evolving very rapidly and its potential is still largely unexploited. In laboratories, new technologies are emerging such as super-critical fluids or nano-particles for use in the pharmaceutical and cosmetics fields. Innovation in this field is accelerating rapidly on an international level, and there are numerous transfers of technologies between sectors.

■  In order to enable industrial players to imagine the applications they could adopt, Innovation 128 and its network of correspondents has been proposing, since 1999, a Technological Watch Programme, TechWatch, which intends to regularly select technical and economic information validated by the best experts.

Main themes

■  Functions

  • Stabilisation and protection: from external physical and chemical agents (humidity, temperature, oxidation, etc.), from interactions between chemically incompatible products, masking taste and odours, surface modification and rheology of powders
  • Controlled release (triggered, prolonged, delayed, with impulse, etc.)

■  Materials and systems

  • Materials: polymers (natural, semi-synthetic, synthetic), lipids (natural and mineral wax, solid fats, glycerides), etc.
  • Systems: micro-particles (micro-spheres, micro-capsules), nano-particles and nano-capsules, vesicular systems (liposomes, spherulites), etc.

■  Manufacturing processes

  • Physical-chemical processes: separation of phases or simple and complex coacervation, solvent evaporation-extraction, thermal gelling of emulsions (melt emulsification), etc.
  • Mechanical processes: spray-drying, prilling, spray-coating, extrusion, co-extrusion/spheronisation
  • Chemical processes: interfacial polycondensation, interfacial polymerisation, polymerisation in dispersed media (emulsion, mini-emulsion, micro-suspension)

■  Applications & markets

  • Pharmaceutical
  • Cosmetics-Hygiene
  • Speciality chemistry
  • Food industry
  • Phyto-sanitary
  • Textiles
  • Other applications

■  International players (Europe, North America, Japan)

  • Academic research
  • Developers