This article is taken from a presentation at the AOCS Annual meeting May 2017. The Surfactants and Detergents Session was designed to honour Dr Milton Rosen for his many contributions to the surfactant field. It was presented by Tony O’Lenick.
Over the years Dr Rosen has examined, characterised, and evaluated many different types of surfactants and their ability to function for very specialised applications. His studies helped provide structure / function insights into how surfactants act in aqueous systems. Building off his work with traditional fatty surfactants in water, the chemistry world has expanded into the realm of non-traditional systems. Such systems include silicone / hydrocarbon surfactants in oil based systems. A silicone / hydrocarbon system can be easily studied and characterised by following the blueprint set forth by Dr Rosen. Just like the systems that Dr Rosen studied, these systems take advantage of the fact that hydrocarbon and silicone are immiscible in each other and have surface activity. As it turns out, when studying the silicone systems, they behave much like fatty surfactants do in aqueous systems. It is perfectly legitimate to ask what is the ‘CMC’ of cetyl dimethicone in mineral oil or in olive oil. This paper will discuss the properties of silicone surfactants used in oil based anhydrous systems and compare them to standard surfactants in aqueous systems.
Surfactants
The term surfactant comes from surface active agent1 (SURFace ACTive ageNT). The most basic definition of a surfactant is molecule that has two covalently linked groups that would be insoluble in each other in pure form.2 Surfactants are usually organic compounds that are amphiphilic, meaning they contain both hydrophobic groups (their tails) and hydrophilic groups (their heads).3 Heretofore, a surfactant was defined as containing both a water-insoluble (or oilsoluble) component and a water-soluble component. Dr Rosen has spent his career as the ‘Father of Surfactants’, working primarily in a field of water and oil based surfactants. His classical book Surfactants and Interfacial Phenomonen4 now in the fourth edition, provides a ‘roadmap’ to study all types of surfactants. This roadmap has been found to apply extremely well to surfactants that do not contain either water or oil soluble groups.
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