TY  - JOUR
AU  - Schneider, Kristina
AU  - Verkoyen, Patrick
AU  - Krappel, Maximilian
AU  - Gardiner, Christina
AU  - Schweins, Ralf
AU  - Frey, Holger
AU  - Sottmann, Thomas
TI  - Efficiency Boosting of Surfactants with Poly(ethylene oxide)-Poly(alkyl glycidyl ether)s: A New Class of Amphiphilic Polymers
JO  - Langmuir
VL  - 36
IS  - 33
SN  - 1520-5827
CY  - Washington, DC
PB  - ACS Publ.
M1  - FZJ-2020-03234
SP  - 9849 - 9866
PY  - 2020
AB  - Twenty years ago, it was found that adding small amounts of amphiphilic block copolymers like poly(ethylene propylene)-co-poly(ethylene oxide) (PEP-b-PEO) to microemul-sion systems strongly increases the efficiency of medium-chain surfactants to solubilize water and oil. Although being predestined to serve as a milestone in microemulsion research, the effect has only scarcely found its way into applications. In this work, we propose new types of efficiency boosters, namely, poly(ethylene oxide)-poly(alkyl glycidyl ether carbonate)s (PEO-b-PAlkGE) and their “carbonated” poly(ethylene oxide)-poly(carbonate alkyl glycidyl ether) analogs. Their synthesis via anionic ring-opening polymerization (AROP) from commercially available long-chain alkyl glycidyl ethers (AlkGE) and monomethoxypoly(ethylene glycol)s as macroinitiators can be performed at low cost and on a large scale. We demonstrate that these new PEO-b-PAlkGE copolymers with dodecyl and hexadecyl side chains in the nonpolar block strongly increase the efficiency of both pure and technical-grade n-alkyl polyglycol ether surfactants to form microemulsions containing pure n-alkanes or even technical-grade waxes, a result that could be of interest for industrial applications where reduced surfactant needs would have significant economic and ecological implications. For n-decane microemulsions, the boosting effect of PEO-b-PAlkGE and PEP-b-PEO polymers can be scaled on top of each other, when plotting the efficiency semilogarithmically versus the polymeric coverage of the amphiphilic film. Interestingly, a somewhat different scaling behavior was observed for n-octacosane microemulsions at elevated temperatures, suggesting that the polymers show less self-avoidance and rather behave as almost ideal chains. A similar trend was found for the increase of the bending rigidity κ upon polymeric coverage of the amphiphilic film, which was obtained from the analysis of small-angle neutron scattering (SANS) measurements.
LB  - PUB:(DE-HGF)16
C6  - pmid:32689803
UR  - <Go to ISI:>//WOS:000566338500022
DO  - DOI:10.1021/acs.langmuir.0c01491
UR  - https://juser.fz-juelich.de/record/884740
ER  -