Can Polarity-Inverted Surfactants Self-Assemble in Nonpolar Solvents?

03 July 2020, Version 2
This content is a preprint and has not undergone peer review at the time of posting.

Abstract

We investigate the self-assembly process of a surfactant with inverted polarity in water and cyclohexane using both all-atom and coarse grained hybrid particle-field molecular
dynamics simulations. Unlike conventional surfactants, the molecule under study proposed in a recent experiment is
formed by a rigid and compact hydrophobic adamantane moiety, and a long and floppy triethylene glycol tail. In water, we report the formation of stable inverted micelles with the adamantane heads grouping together into a hydrophobic core, and the tails forming hydrogen bonds with water. By contrast, multi-microsecond simulations do not provide evidence of stable micelle formation in cyclohexane. Validating the computational results by comparison with experimental diffusion constant and small-angle neutron scattering intensity, we show that at laboratory thermodynamic conditions the mixture resides in the supercritical region of the phase diagram, where aggregated and free surfactant states co-exist in solution. Our simulations also provide indications about how to escape this region, to produce thermodynamically stable micellar forms.

Keywords

Surfactant aggregation
surfactant solutions
micelle
Solvent effect
Self-assembly

Supplementary materials

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