Nonionic Micelles near the Critical Point: Micellar Growth and Attractive Interaction†

By O. Glatter, G. Fritz, H. Lindner, J. Brunner-Popela, R. Mittelbach, Reinhard Strey, Stefan U. Egelhaaf. 2000

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We report on a series of SANS experiments on the structure of binary water−nonionic surfactant systems accompanied by complementary ultralow shear experiments and depolarized light scattering. The analysis gives a clear picture of the temperature dependence of aqueous solutions of nonionic surfactants of the n-alkyl polyglycol ether type (CiEj) when approaching the cloud point curve. The series is based on temperature variations from 3 °C up to a temperature of about 1.5 K below the critical point Tc and concentration variations around the critical concentration cc by a factor of 3−9. Six different surfactants were studied, changing the alkyl chain length i as well as the number of ethylene oxide groups j. Excluded volume effects were taken into account in the evaluation procedure by a generalized indirect Fourier transformation procedure recently developed for the evaluation of scattering data from semidilute and dense systems. The bottom line is that all systems examined show a sphere-to-rod transition,...

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Organic Chemistry, Spectroscopy

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/feabcf09c7bd2756e80be6fa9a49eaa1f18fdd6d