Abstract

There have been many reports about the thickening ability of nanoparticles on the wormlike micelles in the recent years. Through the addition of nanoparticles, the viscosity of wormlike micelles can be increased. There still exists a doubt: can viscosity be increased further by adding more nanoparticles? To answer this issue, in this work, the effects of silica nanoparticles and temperature on the nanoparticles-enhanced wormlike micellar system (NEWMS) were studied. The typical wormlike micelles (wormlike micelles) are prepared by 50 mM cetyltrimethyl ammonium bromide (CTAB) and 60 mM sodium salicylate (NaSal). The rheological results show the increase of viscoelasticity in NEWMS by adding nanoparticles, with the increase of zero-shear viscosity and relaxation time. However, with the further increase of nanoparticles, an interesting phenomenon appears. The zero-shear viscosity and relaxation time reach the maximum and begin to decrease. The results show a slight increasing trend for the contour length of wormlike micelles by adding nanoparticles, while no obvious effect on the entanglement and mesh size. In addition, with the increase of temperature, remarkable reduction of contour length and relaxation time can be observed from the calculation. NEWMS constantly retain better viscoelasticity compared with conventional wormlike micelles without silica nanoparticles. According to the Arrhenius equation, the activation energy Ea shows the same increase trend of NEWMS. Finally, a mechanism is proposed to explain this interesting phenomenon.

Highlights

  • Since 1980’s nanocrystals have been firstly prepared by manual work, research studies and applications of nanostructured materials have received widespread attention [1,2]

  • In order to investigate the influence of added nanoparticles on nanoparticles-enhanced wormlike micellar system (NEWMS) at elevated temperatures, order to investigatearethe influencefirstly

  • The viscosity of NEWMS can reach the maximum with the addition of nanoparticles

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Summary

Introduction

Since 1980’s nanocrystals have been firstly prepared by manual work, research studies and applications of nanostructured materials have received widespread attention [1,2]. Nanoparticles often refer to very small solid particles, which range from 1 to 100 nm [3]. Due to the small size, nanoparticles show special properties, such as large specific surface area and adsorption performance [4,5,6,7,8]. The study of materials modification by adding nanoparticles has been developed in the recent years, where enhancing the strength of wormlike micelles by adding nanoparticles is one of the focuses. Viscoelastic surfactants have attracted more researchers’ attention due to good viscoelasticity, sand suspension, stability and environmentally friendliness [9].

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