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Figure 1
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Team 06

Team Members

Faculty Advisor

Sarah Barta
Ava Maselli
Richa Balamurugan
Kaitlyn Mahoney

Anson Ma

Sponsor

Unilever

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Protocol Development to Achieve Revolutionary Skin Benefits from a Cleanser

Choosing the perfect body wash has become a routine for many consumers. Over the years, consumer preferences have shifted from normal, day-to-day cleansers to products that deliver a luxurious end-to-end experience. In a growing market, companies aim to deliver cleansing properties in their body wash products while differentiating themselves from their competitors. Unilever, one of the world’s largest consumer goods companies, achieves this goal through breakthrough emulsion technology. This technology improves oil deposition by creating smaller oil droplets, improving moisturization efficiency. Today, Unilever is only able to deliver 24 hours of micromoisture to North American consumers. With ambitions to bring the technology to other parts of the globe, factors such as cost and regional regulations need to be considered. As such, a new global protocol to quickly prototype and scale emulsion formulations within these constraints is needed. Our project focused on developing this protocol and as a result we've generated a potential prototype formulation for Unilever to use globally. With Unilever’s assistance, our team generated a design of experiments where various formulations with different inclusion percentages were tested and several stable prototypes were identified by analyzing their viscosities. We then chose one prototype to scale up in Unilever’s pilot plant, effectively producing multiple emulsion batches. From our testing, a model was developed to predict the necessary parameters to achieve the desired droplet size distributions. While this is only the beginning of developing a global protocol, the information the team has gathered will be substantial to evolving the formulation experiments further.