By Eduardo Nascimento

Droplet size distributions (DSDs) play a major role in the development of new products, influencing mouth feel, stability of emulsions, and shelf life. The pulse field gradient (PFG) TD-NMR is a powerful method to solve the emulsion-sizing problem. One of the challenges of this method is to perform the experimental data processing. For homogeneously mixed emulsion systems with a low-viscosity continuous phase, assuming a lognormal form for the droplet size distribution is a satisfactory solution. However, for multimodal samples, the imposition of a lognormal shape can lead to incorrect conclusions. To solve the problem without assuming a shape for the distribution, a regularisation technique is employed.