Morphological transformations during drying of surfactant-nanofluid droplets

The effect of surfactants with different chain length on the drying dynamics of nanosized dispersion droplets and on the final morphology of the grains formed after water evaporation is investigated experimentally. An acoustic levitator was used to examine the drying dynamics of single droplets and SEM imaging was used to characterise the morphology of the final dried grains. Results show that the drying of drops with high molecular weight surfactants leads to more irregular grains and that the grain morphology is related to surface tension driven instability of the evaporating droplets which may lead to formation of hollow dried grains.