4.2. The Hydrophilic Linker
4.2. The Hydrophilic Linker
It was suggested that a similar intermediate be placed on the other side of the interface between the surfactant head and the water and was called a hydrophilic linker
[72][73]. Its benefit was, however, much less significant, mainly because it was not producing a much higher penetration of the surfactant head group into water.
Moreover, it was known that the solubilization of a polar oil with an ordinary surfactant having a head group and an alkyl tail, as indicated in
Figure 4c, was not very good because of a lack of perfect matching of the hydrocarbon tail with the polar oil. This is why adding a lipophilic linker in the oil phase close to the interface produced an improvement of the interaction with polar oil.
Nevertheless, the lipophilic linker was actually an oil phase component; a significant amount of it was lost in the oil bulk far from the interface, and thus partitioning was even worse with a polar oil. It was thus necessary to find a means to cumulate the favorable effects and avoid the unwanted ones.
4.3. The Extended Surfactant with an Intramolecular PO Extension
4.3. The Extended Surfactant with an Intramolecular PO Extension
The idea developed in the 1990s
[13][15][53][74] was to fasten together the rather hydrophilic surfactant and the lipophilic linker, producing the same effect as the mixture without losing a part of the lipophilic linker deviating from the interface. Since the lipophilic linker was an amphiphile with a small hydrophilic part located close to the interface, the single structure shown in
Figure 4d to imitate the mixture situation is a so-called “extended” surfactant. It contains a polar head located in water, then an intermediate slightly polar zone in the oil phase close to the interface, and finally, the surfactant classical hydrocarbon tail.
Figure 4d shows that the slightly polar intermediate extension is bent and interacts with the water molecules, producing more A
CW interaction.
The central extension was selected to be a polypropylene oxide (PO) because it was neatly lipophilic and was thus located on the oil side of the interface with good interaction with polar oil molecules. It also perfectly plays its main role of displacing the alkyl part of the tail further away from the interface, as shown in
Figure 4d, without the usual precipitation problem at increasing the tail size. It is worth noting that our original extended surfactants, e.g., C
12PO
NEO
2SO
4-Na
+, had a much longer intermediate (N up 14) than the alkoxylated surfactants available at this time, which had very few units only. It should be noted that a 10-unit PO chain is about three times longer than a C12
n-alkyl group, so that the actual tail extension is considerable, even if it is not completely perpendicular to the interface
[20][75].
The PO chain is in the zone where the polar oil molecules are segregated, while the alkyl hydrocarbon part of the tail could be far away from the interface where most of the oil could be the non-polar one. This was an extra matching situation between the surfactant tail and the oil phase containing polar molecules. Sometimes, a very short ethoxylation (2 groups) is placed at the end of the PO chain, not really as a hydrophilic linker part, but rather because it makes an easier addition of the sulfate or other hydrophilic group
[17][18][19][21][22].
The improving performance with polar oil was reported first by Miñana
[13][53], particularly in mixtures of extended surfactants with ordinary species that were not solubilizing at all like triglyceride vegetable oils. Most research carried out in the following years used different anionic and nonionic heads sometimes connected by two EO groups to the propoxylated extension
[76].
4.4. The Increased Performance of Extended Surfactant Systems with Polar Oils and Crude Oils
4.4. The Increased Performance of Extended Surfactant Systems with Polar Oils and Crude Oils
The general results obtained in the last 20 years have been extensively reviewed very recently
[2] and should be examined in detail because of the large amount of available data. The main aspects can be summarized as follows. First of all, the PO chain is significantly lipophilic, and only sightly hydrophilic, i.e., much less than a polyethylene oxide chain. The PO unit is three times longer than a (CH
2) methylene group in a surfactant typical
n-alkyl tail; it thus considerably extends the surfactant penetration in oil and increases the interaction, particularly with polar oil segregated close to the interface. The first 2–4 PO groups stay close to the water phase, so the molecule is twisted in this zone, and is not really straight and perpendicular to the interface, as can be seen in
Figure 4d
[26][77]. In some cases, the accumulation of the PO groups outside the water can be considerable, in particular at the air surface where they are said to form rugby balls
[78][79]. This arbitrary gathering of the first PO group in a short and twisted hydrated chain close to the water phase produces some disorder that helps avoiding the surfactant’s rigidity and precipitation. A branched structure, such as the Guerbet double tail, was found to improve the extended surfactant interaction with oil phases, in particular with di/triglycerides
[14][80]. An increasing number of PO groups from five to 15 definitively increases the performance, which practically stays constant at higher PON. A PON term may be introduced in the HLD correlation but not as a linear term since it is also dealing with the surfactant hydrophobe part length (SAT)
[2][27]. A more continuous change from hydrophilic to lipophilic parts, including an intermediate with an additional butylene oxide block between the alkyl tail and the propylene oxide block, improves, even more, the performance
[28]. This is probably because it results in a very wide zone with a smooth variation of hydrophilicity, which is particularly appropriate to interact with crude oils containing many polar species containing functional groups bearing nitrogen, sulfur and oxygen atoms, such as asphaltenes, naphthenic acids, etc.
[81][50][51][82][83].
The last benefit found in an extended surfactant is that being an intramolecular mixture between ionic and nonionic parts, a proper adjustment of the different blocks could present new opportunities such as insensitivity to temperature
[84][85] or insensitivity to surfactant concentration
[25] and robustness to electrolyte concentration and mixture variations, including new applications with complex biobased polar oils
[29][86][87].