Hydrophobicity inversion of short chained alcohols in microemulsions due to the polarity difference of polar and non-polar phase
Microemulsions play an important role in many applications e.g. cleaning processes, drug transport or as reaction medium for chemical reactions. To control the nanostructure of these ternary or higher order systems temperature as well as titrating agents (e.g. alcohols) can be used. In common non-ionic microemulsions including n alkanes these alcohols act as co-solvent if they are short chained (i<3) or co-surfactant if they are long chained (i>4) thereby inducing phase inversion. While non-ionic surfactants of the general structure CiEj exhibit the same phase behaviour independent of the chemical nature of the oil used, we recently observed that this is not true for interfacially active alcohols: Methanol should act as a co-solvent in the ternary system water-ethylbenzene-heptaethyleneglycoldecylether (C10E7) solely looking at its molecular structure. However, it influences the phase behaviour as e.g. n-butanol would. Exchanging ethylbenzene by the non-aromatic, but structurally similar, ethylcyclohexane the expected effect of a co-solvent occurs. Hence, it seems very likely that the interfacial properties of alcohols also depend on the polarity difference between the two phases.
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SCHREINER Tim; GRASSBERGER Lena; GRILLO Isabelle; HARBAUER Carola; KLEMMER Helge and STREY Reinhard. (2015). Hydrophobicity inversion of short chained alcohols in microemulsions due to the polarity difference of polar and non-polar phase. Institut Laue-Langevin (ILL) doi:10.5291/ILL-DATA.9-10-1439
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