Reverse micelle aggregation mechanism

Hydrocarbon oxidation produces polar oxygen-containing compounds. These compounds tend to associate in nonpolar hydrocarbon and form some aggregates. The formation of such a microheterogeneous polar system can influence the rate and mechanism of oxidation [20]. The study of hydrocarbon oxidation in the systems with reversed micelles has its special... 

Figure 4. Idealized AOT reverse micelle or microemulsion structure and a proposed aggregation (or clustering) mechanism which maintains the distinct solvent environments for the reverse micelle conqponents.

Further work is clearly needed to unravel the detailed mechanisms of the hydrolysis and polymerization reactions in these micellar systems. Of particular interest is a better description of the initial stages of growth, which are believed to be responsible for the narrow monodispersity of the particles obtained within the entire R range. Other issues of interest are the location of hydrolysis products and other intermediates, changes in the aggregation number of surfactant molecules due to changes in the nature of the solubilized aqueous phase, and a quantitative description of the particle-filled and empty reverse micelle populations. 

Two mechanisms are proposed to explain the reaction that occurs in a microemulsion medium, considering that the reactants are each dissolved individually in a single water core of the microemulsion. In the first, the encounter with fusion of two reverse micellar aggregates permits the complexation reaction. The reaction can be represented in a two-step mechanism scheme considering each reactant to be dissolved in a reverse micelle ... 

Enzymes and micelles resemble each other with respect to both structure (e.g., globular proteins and spherical aggregates) and catalytic activity. Probably the most common form of enzyme catalysis follows the mechanism known in biochemistry as Michaelis-Menton kinetics. In this the rate of the reaction increases with increasing substrate concentration, eventually leveling off. According to this mechanism, enzyme E and substrate A first react reversibly to form a complex EA, which then dissociates to form product P and regenerate the enzyme ... 

From the data presented in Chapter 10, it becomes evident that the extreme longevity of the artificial surfactant-stabilized microbubbles described therein is, in part, related to their continuous interaction with the simultaneously formed mixed micelle population in the saturated surfactant solution. More specifically, the surfactant-stabilized microbubbles produced by mechanical agitation of saturated solutions of either CAV-CON s Filmix 2 or Filmix 3 apparently undergo a cyclical (or reversible) process of microbubble formation/coalescence/fission/disappearance, where the end of each cycle is characterized by a collapse of the lipid-coated microbubbles into large micellar structures (i.e., rodlike multimolecular aggregates), only to re-emerge soon after as newly formed, lipid-coated microbubbles (see also below). 

In this paper, the results of a Monte Carlo method for the simulation of the stochastic time evolution of the micellization process are presented. The computational algorithm [1] used represents an optimization of a general procedure introduced by Gillespie some years ago [2]. It was applied to the case of surfactant reversible association according to the general mechanism reported in Fig. 1 that allows associations and dissociations among -mers of whatever aggregation number. 

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