Greener Surface Active Reagents

Surfactants are used in many industrial applications, such as flotation, flocculation, water treatment, enhanced oil recovery, emulsification, drug delivery, personal care, detergency, chemical mechanical polishing, etc. The design, development, and characterization of greener surfactants in their applications are required to meet the increasing requirements for environmental protection and an escalating demand from the society for sustainable development. It is a challenge currently to develop structure-property-performance relationships for surfactant mixtures containing greener reagents to obtain maximum efficiency with minimum environmental damages. Even though conventional surfactants and their mixtures are well studied, the fundamental studies of the structure, property and performance relationships for greener surfactants when used individually or in combination with others are just started as more and more attentions are focusing on this area. In this work, solution behaviors of surfactant systems containing several amino acid based greener surfactants have been systematically investigated using various techniques, including surface tensiometry, fluorescence spectroscopy, a