Industrial examples surfactants

The field of monosaccharides, disaccharides and polysaccharids contains many industrial examples of semi-synthesis, which have entered chemical history, such the hydrolysis of starch to form D-glucose, the esterification of cellulose, the chemistry of rayon and, more recently, advances in the chemistry of carbohydrate surfactants (ref.83). 

With many industrial formulations, surfactants of different kinds are mixed together, for example anionics and nonionics. The nonionic surfactant molecules shield the repulsion between the negative head groups in the micelle, and consequently there will be a net interaction between the two types of molecules. Another example is the case when anionic and cationic surfactants are mixed, whereby a very strong interaction will take place between the oppositely charged surfactant molecules. To account for this interaction. Equation (3.25) must be modified by introducing activity coefficients of the surfactants,/j" and/2 in the micelle. 

With the expansion of the textile industry, other surfactants besides soap began to achieve importance. For example, industry a surface-active product, produced by sulfonation of castor oil, possesses outstanding properties. Under the name of turkey red oil , it is still in use today. It was found that the sulfuric acid semi-ester of the OH-group of ricinoleic acid was the surface-active moiety in this material. At first, the carboxylic group of the ricinoleic acid was transformed into an ester to avoid forming insoluble salts from the water hardness. Later, Bertsch logically arrived at the use of fatty alcohols instead of ricinoleic acid as suitable hydrophobic starting materials. 

Because of their amphiphilic character, alkali resinates have been exploited both as polymer latex stabilizers and as surfactants in emulsion polymerization from the early development of these techniques, as in the pre-Second World War industrial example of the polymerization of 2-chloro-l,3-butadiene, to produce neoprene [68]. In the following decades, other emulsion polymerizations systems, like the synthesis of styrene-butadiene copolymers [68, 69], also called upon these surfactants, which are still being envisaged today, for example, for the polymerization of styrene [70] and chloroprene [71]. However, the reactivity of the conjugated double bond towards free radicals has made it more profitable to use hydrogenated or dehydrogenated rosins rather than their natural forms [68, 72]. 

Fluorinated surfactants are both hydrophobic and lipophobic. For example, potassium per-fluorooctanesulfonate—an industrially important surfactant —forms a third phase with octanol and water, and it is impossible to determine its octanol-water partition coefficient. " Similar to fluorocarbon-hydrocarbon bulk solvent mixtures, mixed binary systems containing a perfluorocarbon surfactant and a structurally related hydrocarbon surfactant are known to behave nonideally, that is, exhibit phase separation in insoluble monolayers at the air-water interface or form two types of micelles simnltaneously in solution—one type is fluorocarbon-rich and the other is hydrocarbon-rich. This nonideal behavior of fluorocarbon-hydrocarbon surfactant mixtures is used in firefighting foams and powders—an important technical application of fluorinated surfactants. " ... 

Detergency and the Displacement of Oil. Detergency involves the action of surfactants to alter interfacial properties so as to promote removal of a phase from solid snrfaces. Obviously, wetting agents are used, and usually those that rapidly diffuse and adsorb at appropriate interfaces are most effective. In this section we will consider a petroleum industry example. 

Industrial Examples of Personal Care Formulations and the Role of Surfactants 423... 

Most industries require surfactants not so much for the manufacture of an end product, but rather as indispensable aid in a manufacturing step or in a chemical reaction. This also includes a number of processes which can be regarded as cleaning or washing steps. For textile manufacturing examples of the working steps are diagrammatically shown in Fig. 7. 

MIBK is a highly effective separating agent for metals from solutions of their salts and is used in the mining industries to extract plutonium from uranium, niobium from tantalum, and zirconium from hafnium (112,113). MIBK is also used in the production of specialty surfactants for inks (qv), paints, and pesticide formulations, examples of which are 2,4,7,9-tetramethyl-5-decyn-4,7-diol and its ethoxylated adduct. Other appHcations include as a solvent for adhesives and wax/oil separation (114), in leather (qv) finishing, textile coating, and as a denaturant for ethanol formulations. 

Due to their favorable solubility, alkanesulfonates are preferred as surfactants in liquid products and concentrates. The recent trend to renewable resources has led to a somewhat reduced use in formulations of household detergents in past years. While some manufacturers have withdrawn these surfactants from, for example, manual dishwashing detergents, others did not. Besides many other industrial applications, alkanesulfonates are one of the most important emulsifiers in vinyl polymerization. 

As mentioned above, neither of the reaction steps in the production of monoesters is particularly high in yield. The finished product therefore contains unreacted raw materials and/or intermediate products. The organic raw materials in themselves are mixtures of many substances. No natural raw material is homogeneous and any naturally based surfactant will be a blend. Fatty alcohol made from coconut oil, for example, is a product containing fatty alcohols from Cj0-Cj8 in varying amounts. Lauryl alcohol obtained from this raw material in its industrial form is a fatty alcohol mainly containing C12 fatty alcohol with, however, significant amounts of C10 and C14 fatty alcohols. 

Salts of alkyl phosphates and types of other surfactants used as emulsifiers and dispersing agents in polymer dispersions are discussed with respect to the preparation of polymer dispersions for use in the manufactoring and finishing of textiles. Seven examples are presented to demonstrate the significance of surfactants on the properties, e.g., sedimentation, wetting behavior, hydrophilic characteristics, foaming behavior, metal adhesion, and viscosity, of polymer dispersions used in the textile industry [239]. 

A useful way of classifying chemicals is shown in Fig. 2.1. Chemicals are divided on the basis of volume and character. Bulk chemicals, or commodities, are produced in large quantities and sold on the basis of an industry specification. There is essentially no difference in the product from different suppliers. Typical examples would be acetone, ethylene oxide, and phenol. Pseudo commodities are also made in large quantities but are sold on the basis of their performance. In many cases the product is formulated and properties can differ from one supplier to another. Examples include large volume polymers, surfactants, paints, etc. 

Carboxylates (9.4, where R is the long-chain hydrophobe and X the cation) represent the oldest type of surfactants, since they could be obtained from naturally occurring fats and oils long before the advent of the petrochemical industry sodium heptadecanoate (9.5), for example, incorporates the cetyl group as hydrophobe. Sodium stearate, sodium palmitate and sodium oleate are the simplest carboxylates generally used as surfactants. Alkylaryl compounds (9.6) are also known. 

LLE has been used in the past for the extraction of pesticides from environmental water samples [17]. However, its application in the extraction of waste-water samples is scarce due to the low efficiency of extraction, especially for polar analytes. Because of the vast amount of surfactants and natural products present in wastewater samples, emulsions are formed which complicate the process of extraction and lead to low extraction recoveries. However, there have been some useful applications of LLE to wastewater analyses. For example, LLE was found to be effective for the isolation of herbicide and pesticide organic compounds from industrial wastewater samples and also from complex matrices [18]. 

The third industrial blend presented here as an example belongs to the cationic surfactants of fatty acid polyglycol amine type with... 

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