Ethylene oligomers Fatty alcohols

Interval I Particle Nucleation.—Piirma and Chang have published some very interesting results for the emulsion polymerization of styrene in the presence of an ethylene oxide-fatty alcohol condensate as surfactant. As expected, the rate of polymerization increases with increasing concentration of surfactant, but the unexpected feature is a pronounced increase in the rate of polymerization which always occurs at ca. 40% conversion. This increase is attributed to the nucleation of a new crop of particles following the release into the aqueous phase of surfactant, which was hitherto dissolved in the monomer droplets. It certainly seems to be significant that the pronounced acceleration of the polymerization occurs at approximately the conversion at which the monomer droplets are expected to disappear. Chen and Piirma have proposed that mixed micelles formed by hydrophobic association between surfactant monomer molecules and oligomers formed by aqueous-solution polymerization can provide significant numbers of loci... 

Synthetic C12+ primary alcohols, produced mainly by the hydroformyl-ation of ethylene oligomers (previous section), compete with fatty alcohols derived from natural oils. They may be sulphated (to give an anionic product) or reacted with ethylene oxide to produce alcohol ethoxylates, the major non-ionic detergent components (possibly approaching IMt per annum worldwide) ... 

Alcohols. Long-chain alcohols (Cg-Cig) are found in nature, but generally in such limited quantities that their direct use is economically prohibitive. They may be readily prepared in industrial quantities, however, by the catalytic reduction of fatty acids or fatty acid esters, by the oxidation of oligomers of ethylene or other light olefins, or by oxidation of a-olefins. They may have... 

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