Engineering Photo-Controllable Fragrance Release with Flash Nanoprecipitation

Abstract Controllable profragrance nanoparticles are in great demand for long-lasting scent in flavor and fragrance industries. However, the practical applications of controllable fragrance release are limited by the non-tunable size, structural heterogeneity and poor reproducibility. Herein, a coumarin-derived phototrigger (CM-OH) is covalently conjugated with alcohol fragrances to obtain the corresponding profragrances (CM-R) which enable to release fragrances under the light controlling conditions. Furthermore, we introduce a new engineering strategy to construct fine tunable and highly uniform profragrance nanoparticles with flash nanoprecipitation (FNP) technology, which features commercial available amphiphilic pluronic F127 polymers by encapsulation of photo-activatable profragrances CM-R in hydrophobic cores to enhance the long-lasting photo-controllable fragrance release. With the assistance of FNP technology, amphiphilic pluronic polymer and profragrances CM-R in organic solution are instantaneously mixed and subsequently precipitated in the multi-inlet vortex mixer (MIVM), thus obtaining the pluronic F127-encapsulated profragrance nanoparticles with good homogeneity. Compared to the traditional thermodynamic encapsulation method, the novel kinetic FNP technology can not only tune the size of profragrance nanoparticles with narrow distribution, but also distinctly improve the batch-to-batch reproducibility, which affords an alternative method for scale-up preparation of amphiphilic profragrance nanoparticles in precisely controllable fragrance delivery system.