During the last years, the formalism of the pseudophase kinetic model (PKM) has been successfully applied to determine the distributions of antioxidants and their effective interfacial concentrations, and to assess the relative importance of emulsion and antioxidant properties (oil and surfactant nature, temperature, acidity, chemical structure, hydrophilic-liphophilic balance (HLB), etc.) on their efficiency in intact lipid-based emulsions. The PKM permits separating the contributions of the medium and of the concentration to the overall rate of the reaction. In this paper, we report the results of a specifically designed experiment to further test the suitability of the PKM to evaluate the distributions of antioxidants among the various regions of intact lipid-based emulsions and provide insights into their chemical reactivity in multiphasic systems. For this purpose, we employed the antioxidants α- and δ-TOCopherol (α- and δ-TOC, respectively) and determined, at different acidities well below their pKa, the interfacial rate constants kI for the reaction between 16-ArN2+ and α- and δ-TOC, and the antioxidant distributions in intact emulsions prepared with olive and soybean oils. Results show that the effective interfacial concentration of δ-TOC is higher than that of α-TOC in 1:9 (v/v) soybean and 1:9 olive oil emulsions. The effective interfacial concentrations of tocopherols are much higher (15-96-fold) than the stoichiometric concentrations, as the effective interfacial concentrations of both δ-TOC and α-TOC in soybean oil emulsions are higher (2-fold) than those in olive oil emulsions. Overall, the results demonstrate that the PKM grants an effective separation of the medium and concentration effects, demonstrating that the PKM constitutes a powerful non-destructive tool to determine antioxidant concentrations in intact emulsions and to assess the effects of various factors affecting them.
Keywords: antioxidants; distribution; emulsions; pseudophase kinetic model; tocopherol.