Cosurfactant micelles

The type of behavior shown by the ethanol-water system reaches an extreme in the case of higher-molecular-weight solutes of the polar-nonpolar type, such as, soaps and detergents [91]. As illustrated in Fig. Ul-9e, the decrease in surface tension now takes place at very low concentrations sometimes showing a point of abrupt change in slope in a y/C plot [92]. The surface tension becomes essentially constant beyond a certain concentration identified with micelle formation (see Section XIII-5). The lines in Fig. III-9e are fits to Eq. III-57. The authors combined this analysis with the Gibbs equation (Section III-SB) to obtain the surface excess of surfactant and an alcohol cosurfactant. 

However, in the case of mini- and microemulsions, processing methods reduce the size of the monomer droplets close to the size of the micelle, leading to significant particle nucleation in the monomer droplets (17). Intense agitation, cosurfactant, and dilution are used to reduce monomer droplet size. Additives like cetyl alcohol are used to retard the diffusion of monomer from the droplets to the micelles, in order to further promote monomer droplet nucleation (18). The benefits of miniemulsions include faster reaction rates (19), improved shear stabiHty, and the control of particle size distributions to produce high soHds latices (20). 

For the separation of amino acids, the applicability of this principle has been explored. For the separation of racemic phenylalanine, an amphiphilic amino acid derivative, 1-5-cholesteryl glutamate (14) has been used as a chiral co-surfactant in micelles of the nonionic surfactant Serdox NNP 10. Copper(II) ions are added for the formation of ternary complexes between phenylalanine and the amino acid cosurfactant. The basis for the separation is the difference in stability between the ternary complexes formed with d- or 1-phenylalanine, respectively. The basic principle of this process is shown in Fig. 5-17 [72]. 

Examples of other frequently used surfactants that able to form reversed micelles without the addition of cosurfactants are didodecyldimethyl ammonium bromide [17], do-decylammonium propionate, benzyldimethylhexadecyl ammonium chloride [18], lecithin [19], tetraethyleneglycol monododecylether (C12E4) [20], decaglycerol dioleate [21], do-decylpyridinium iodide [22], and sodium bis(2-ethylhexyl) phosphate [23],... 

Surfactants employed for w/o-ME formation, listed in Table 1, are more lipophilic than those employed in aqueous systems, e.g., for micelles or oil-in-water emulsions, having a hydrophilic-lipophilic balance (HLB) value of around 8-11 [4-40]. The most commonly employed surfactant for w/o-ME formation is Aerosol-OT, or AOT [sodium bis(2-ethylhexyl) sulfosuccinate], containing an anionic sulfonate headgroup and two hydrocarbon tails. Common cationic surfactants, such as cetyl trimethyl ammonium bromide (CTAB) and trioctylmethyl ammonium bromide (TOMAC), have also fulfilled this purpose however, cosurfactants (e.g., fatty alcohols, such as 1-butanol or 1-octanol) must be added for a monophasic w/o-ME (Winsor IV) system to occur. Nonionic and mixed ionic-nonionic surfactant systems have received a great deal of attention recently because they are more biocompatible and they promote less inactivation of biomolecules compared to ionic surfactants. Surfactants with two or more hydrophobic tail groups of different lengths frequently form w/o-MEs more readily than one-tailed surfactants without the requirement of cosurfactant, perhaps because of their wedge-shaped molecular structure [17,41]. 

Likewise, in order to evaluate nonionics transport, ethylene-oxide distribution in the cosurfactant (Genapol) was determined by HPLC at two stages of production in test 7 (1) before breakthrough of the desorbent, i.e. in the presence of sulfonate in the effluent and (2) after its breakthrough when the three additives coexist in solution in the form of mixed micelles. 

These microdroplets can act as a reaction medium, as do micelles or vesicles. They affect indicator equilibria and can change overall rates of chemical reactions, and the cosurfactant may react nucleophilically with substrate in a microemulsion droplet. Mixtures of surfactants and cosurfactants, e.g. medium chain length alcohols or amines, are similar to o/w microemulsions in that they have ionic head groups and cosurfactant at their surface in contact with water. They are probably best described as swollen micelles, but it is convenient to consider their effects upon reaction rates as being similar to those of microemulsions (Athanassakis et al., 1982). 

A microemulsion droplet is a multicomponent system containing oil, surfactant, cosurfactant, and probably water therefore there may be considerable variation in size and shape depending upon the overall composition. The packing constraints which dictate size and shape of normal micelles (Section 1) should be relaxed in microemulsions because of the presence of cosurfactant and oil. However, it is possible to draw analogies between the behavior of micelles and microemulsion droplets, at least in the more aqueous media. 

An additional point is that relatively high concentrations of surfactant, oil and cosurfactant are often used in microemulsions. Thus the volume of the microemulsion pseudophase is large and droplet-bound reactants are therefore diluted. Generally speaking, rate enhancements increase in the sequence microemulsions < micelles < vesicles simply because of a decrease in the volume of the micellar or droplet pseudophase. 

The reverse microemulsion method can be used to manipulate the size of silica nanoparticles [25]. It was found that the concentration of alkoxide (TEOS) slightly affects the size of silica nanoparticles. The majority of excess TEOS remained unhydrolyzed, and did not participate in the polycondensation. The amount of basic catalyst, ammonia, is an important factor for controlling the size of nanoparticles. When the concentration of ammonium hydroxide increased from 0.5 (wt%) to 2.0%, the size of silica nanoparticles decreased from 82 to 50 nm. Most importantly, in a reverse microemulsion, the formation of silica nanoparticles is limited by the size of micelles. The sizes of micelles are related to the water to surfactant molar ratio. Therefore, this ratio plays an important role for manipulation of the size of nanoparticles. In a Triton X-100/n-hexanol/cyclohexane/water microemulsion, the sizes of obtained silica nanoparticles increased from 69 to 178 nm, as the water to Triton X-100 molar ratio decreased from 15 to 5. The cosurfactant, n-hexanol, slightly influences the curvature of the radius of the water droplets in the micelles, and the molar ratio of the cosurfactant to surfactant faintly affects the size of nanoparticles as well. 

This transition may j-.e. reducing the specific surface energy, f. The reduction of f to sufficiently small values was accounted for by Ruckenstein (15) in terms of the so called dilution effect". Accumulation of surfactant and cosurfactant at the interface not only causes significant reduction in the interfacial tension, but also results in reduction of the chemical potential of surfactant and cosurfactant in bulk solution. The latter reduction may exceed the positive free energy caused by the total interfacial tension and hence the overall Ag of the system may become negative. Further analysis by Ruckenstein and Krishnan (16) have showed that micelle formation encountered with water soluble surfactants reduces the dilution effect as a result of the association of the the surfactants molecules. However, if a cosurfactant is added, it can reduce the interfacial tension by further adsorption and introduces a dilution effect. The treatment of Ruckenstein and Krishnan (16) also highlighted the role of interfacial tension in the formation of microemulsions. When the contribution of surfactant and cosurfactant adsorption is taken into account, the entropy of the drops becomes negligible and the interfacial tension does not need to attain ultralow values before stable microemulsions form. 

Winsor [15] classified the phase equilibria of microemulsions into four types, now called Winsor I-IV microemulsions, illustrated in Fig. 15.5. Types I and II are two-phase systems where a surfactant rich phase, the microemulsion, is in equilibrium with an excess organic or aqueous phase, respectively. Type III is a three-phase system in which a W/O or an O/W microemulsion is in equilibrium with an excess of both the aqueous and the organic phase. Finally, type IV is a single isotropic phase. In many cases, the properties of the system components require the presence of a surfactant and a cosurfactant in the organic phase in order to achieve the formation of reverse micelles one example is the mixture of sodium dodecylsulfate and pentanol. 

The reactant does not form reverse micelles under the conditions of the process, in which case a surfactant, and sometimes also a cosurfactant, must be added to the organic phase in order to produce a reverse micellar phase. In this case the reverse micelles are usually mixed, i.e., they include in the micellar shell the reactant and the additives. 

Reverse micelles of CTAB in octane with hexanol as cosurfactant were reported to be able to lyse whole cells quickly and accommodate the liberated enzyme rapidly into the water pool of surfactant aggregates [50,51]. In another case a periplasmic enzyme, cytochrome c553, was extracted from the periplasmic fraction using reverse micelles [52]. The purity achieved in one separation step was very close to that achieved with extensive column chromatography. These results show that reverse micelles can be used for the extraction of intracellular proteins. 

Microemulsions are thermodynamically stable mixtures. The interfacial tension is almost zero. The size of drops is very small, and this makes the microemulsions look clear. It has been suggested that microemulsion may consists of bicontinuous structures, which sounds more plausible in these four-component microemulsion systems. It has also been suggested that microemulsion may be compared to swollen micelles (i.e., if one solubilizes oil in micelles). In such isotropic mixtures, short-range order exists between droplets. As found from extensive experiments, not all mixtures of water-oil-surfactant-cosurfactant produce a microemulsion. This has led to studies that have attempted to predict the molecular relationship. 

As mentioned earlier, surfactants aggregate to form micelles, which may vary in size (i.e., number of monomers per micelle) from a few to over a thousand monomers. However, surfactants can form, besides simple micellar aggregates (i.e., spherical or ellipsoidal), many other structures also when mixed with other substances. The curved micelle aggregates are known to change to planar interfaces when additives, the so-called cosurfactants, are added. A reported recipe consists of... 

The addition of salts to micelles gives large micelles that turn into cylindrical shapes. However, the addition of cosurfactant produces the liquid crystal phase. As a consequence, these micellar systems with added cosurfactant are found to undergo several macroscopic phase transitions in dilute solutions. These transitions are as follows ... 

This method involves formation of reverse micelles in the presence of surfactants at a water-oil interface. A clear homogeneous solution obtained by the addition of another amine or alcohol-based cosurfactant is termed a Microemulsion. To a reverse micelle solution containing a dissolved metal salt, a second reverse micelle solution containing a suitable reducing agent is added reducing the metal cations to metals. The synthesis of oxides from reverse micelles depends on the coprecipitation of one or more metal ions from... 

Microemulsions are thermodynamically stable, homogeneous, optically isotropic solutions comprised of a mixture of water, hydrocarbons and amphiphilic compoxmds. The microemulsions are usually four- or three-component systems consisting of surfactant and cosurfactant (termed as emulsifier), oil and water. The cosurfactants are either lower alkanols (like butanol, propanol and hexanol) or amines (Hke butylamine, hexylamine). Microemulsions are often called swollen micelles (Fig. 3) and swollen re-... 

Nazario LMM, Hatton TA, Crespo JPSG (1996) Nonionic cosurfactants in AOT reversed micelles Effect on percolation, size, and solubilization site. Langmuir... 

The effectiveness of the method is most probably based on the fact that alkyl hypochlorite is formed at the oil/water interface where the cosurfactant alcohol resides. The oxidation that follows takes place either inside or on the surface of oil droplet. The rate of the reaction can result from a large hydrocarbon/water contact area permitting interaction between oil-soluble sulfide with interfacial cosurfactant that served as an intermediary. An extension ofthis procedure to mustard deactivation has also been proposed [20b]. Such systems could be also applied to the degradation of several environmentally contaminating materials The formation of microemulsions, micelles and vesicles is promoted by unfavourable interactions at the end sections of simple bilayer membranes. There is no simple theory of solute-solvent interactions. However, the formation of... 

Riess demonstrated recently that poly(styrene-b-oxirane) copolymers could act as non-ionic surfactants and lead to water/ toluene microemulsions (29, 30). Using isopropanol as cosurfactant, both 0/W and W/0 microemulsions are obtained (3l). This is a very important conclusion, since PO based diblock copolymers give rise only to 0/W microemulsions under the same experimental conditions (8, 31,). In this respect the "branched structure" of the PO hydrophilic component could favor a decrease in the packing density of the inverse micelle forming molecular and explain the different behavior of the linear and star-shaped PS/PO block copolymers in the W/0 microemulsification process. 

Microemulsions form spontaneously in much the same way as structural elements, such as surfactant micelles, rearrange themselves following the addition of the cosurfactant. Because the water may be incorporated into the hydrophilic structures of reverse micelles, when examined by x-ray analysis spherical droplets with diameters of 6-80 nm have been reported. 

In many cases, the solubility of a water-insoluble drug can be enhanced by adding a cosurfactant to a surfactant solution. Such solubility enhancement is useful for mixed micelle and emulsion formulation development. 

This transition from reverse micelles to a tridimensional H-bond network has a direct consequence on third-phase formation. Moreover, the structure of the solution does not depend on the nitric acid concentration. Third-phase formation is thus prevented. Significant variations in extraction properties can be expected concurrently with this micelle-to-cosolvent microstructural transition. Without octanol, polar microdomains are clearly separated from the apolar solvent by an interface, whereas in the second system, the transition between polar and apolar areas is spatially more extended and probably creates an open structure as in a network. Nevertheless, a systematic study with structural determination in relation with the extraction ability is not yet available in the literature. Regarding the efficiency of the extractant solution containing modifiers, the key issue is also the competition for complexation between the complexing agent and the cosurfactant head-group. 

Soft-core reverse micelles are spherical or ellipsoidal aggregates consisting of a water core separated from a continuous apolar phase by a surfactant shell. It is well known that in the absence of water, some surfactants such as sodium bis(2-ethylhexyl) sulfosuccinate (AOT) can form dry aggregates, while others such as sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS) or hexadecyl-trimethylamonium bromide (CTAB) need a cosurfactant, e.g., a short chain alcohol, to form micelles. 

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