FORMULATION DEVELOPMENT OF MICRO AND NANOEMULSION OF FENUGREEK OIL

Oil in water nano and microemulsions can be defined as emulsions containing oil droplets in the range of 50-100 nm in diameter and 5-50 nm respectively. There is a growing interest in the development of nano and microemulsions to encapsulate, protect, and deliver lipophilic compounds, such as nutraceuticals, drugs, flavours, antioxidants and antimicrobial agents, for their application in the food, pharmaceutical, agrochemical and other industries. Formulation of a nano & microemulsion is achieved through low energy technique, using phase inversion technique and the droplet size depends on weight ratio between surfactant and oil. Different formulations of different proportions of surfactant tween 80 & fenugreek oil were prepared and added to it different amounts of water and the mixture was mixed using a vortex, for two minutes. From the collected data it is clear that changing the proportion of water in the developed formulation while keeping the weight ratio between the surfactant and the oil constant, affected the droplet size, polydispersity index and zeta potential. Key Words: nanoemulsion, microemulsion, tween 80, fenugreek oil, polydispersity index, zeta potential