Abstract
With continuous development of pesticide dosage forms, emulsifiable concentrates using large amounts of organic solvents are gradually obsoleted. Nanoemulsions with high water content have been developed and the preparation processes also evolved, but these processes still exist some problems, such as poor controllability and high energy consumption. Microfluidic is a controllable nanoemulsion preparation system which mainly applied to pharmaceutical synthesis. In this study, the pesticide phoxim nanoemulsion was prepared by microfluidic technology. The optimized formulation of phoxim nanoemulsion was composed of Tween 80 and pesticide emulsifier 500 as surfactant, hexyl acetate as oil, and n-propanol as co-surfactant. Moreover, when the flow rates of water and oil in the microfluidic system were adjusted to 5 μL/min and 20 μL/min, phoxim nanoemulsion was obtained with a cloud point/boiling point of 109 °C, a particle size of 21.5 ± 0.8 nm and a potential value of − 18.7 ± 0.6 mV. Furthermore, the nanoemulsion had a rapid release effect in vitro which could be fitted by the Ritger-Peppas model. The feeding toxicity of the phoxim nanoemulsion was higher than that of commercial formulation while the contact killing effect was higher than that of the active ingredient. Therefore, pesticide dosage was reduced and the insecticidal effect was enhanced by using phoxim nanoemulsions. These results also confirm the potential of microfluidics as a green process to produce pesticide nanoemulsions.
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All data generated or analyzed during this study are included in this published article. The raw data retrieved during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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Acknowledgements
The authors thank the Biotechnology Laboratory of Jiangsu University of Science and Technology for providing the experimental equipment.
Funding
This work was supported by the Jiangsu Agricultural Science and Technology Innovation Fund (CX(20)2029), the Modern Agricultural Industry Technology System of China (CARS-18), the Development Project (Modern Agriculture) of Jiangsu Province (BE2021344), the Postgraduate Research & Practice Innovation Program of Jiangsu Province (KYCX21_3510), the Zhenjiang Science and Technology Innovation Fund Key Research and Development Plan (NY2020005), and the Start-up Funding from Jiangsu University of Science and Technology.
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Li ZN designed the nanoemulsion experiments, draws figures and tables and wrote the manuscript. Zhang YX completed the nanoemulsion experiments and statistics. Zhang ZA completed the insecticide experiments. Pan LH checked and retouched the manuscript. Li P and Xu Y polished the language. Sheng S designed the insecticide experiments. Wang J and Wu FA were responsible for reviewing and supervising. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Li, ZN., Zhang, YX., Zhang, ZA. et al. Microfluidic preparation of a novel phoxim nanoemulsion pesticide against Spodoptera litura. Environ Sci Pollut Res 29, 59653–59665 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-022-20001-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-022-20001-x