Acknowledgements
I am very grateful as a graduate student at Rice University. I would like to
express my sincere appreciation to my two advisors, Professor Clarence A. Miller
and Professor George J. Hirasaki for their guidance, inspiration, and assistance.
Their wisdom and authoritative knowledge have helped me a lot throughout
these years.
I appreciate ProfessorWaIter G. Chapman and Professor Mason B. Tomson
for serving on my thesis committee.
Many research staffs, graduates and undergraduates have contributed with
their experimental work and/or valuable ideas to this thesis. I wish to express my
sincere thankfulness and appreciation to them:
Maura Puerto, Olina Raney and Shunhua Liu for their assistance and
suggestions to my research work.
Marc Fleury, Arjun Kurup, Michael Rauschhuber, Vivek Anand, Mark Flaum,
Clint Aichele and Zheng Yang for their help with NMR measurement, and for
useful suggestions to my research on NMR characterization of emulsion.
Dr. Matteo Pasquali, Nikta Fakhri and Arjun Prakash for their help of
microscopy observation of emulsion.
Dr. Kyriacos Zygourakis, Dr. Michael Wong, Jie Yu, Yu-Iun Fang and Xuan
Guo fortheir help Ofemulsion centrifugation.
Yu Bian and Feng Li for the BET analysis and acid number titration.
iii
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