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Molecular Crystals and Liquid Crystals, Vol.500, 166-181, 2009
Metastability of Multi-Lamellar Vesicles in a Nonionic System
Nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy and rheological analysis have been used to investigate the stability of mechanically induced tri-ethylene-glycol-mono-n-decyl-ether (C(10)E(3))/deuterium oxide (D(2)O) multi-lamellar vesicles (MLVs) and the transition from MLVs to planar lamellae. It was found that MLVs prepared by vortex stirring, relax back to the lamellar phase in a few hours while the relaxation of the shear induced MLVs takes days. Pulsed gradient spin echo and water self-diffusion coefficient experiments, revealed that the MLVs texture, obtained by vortex stirring, is composed of large size structures. These data indicate that the kinetics of lamellar re-formation depend on the MLVs number density.