Monte Carlo Simulation of Mixed Lennard-Jones Nonionic Surfactant Adsorption at the Liquid/Vapor Interface

Abstract

New Monte Carlo simulations are presented for nonionic surfactant adsorption at the liquid/vapor interface of a monatomic solvent specifically investigating the roles of tail attraction and binary mixtures of different tail lengths. Surfactant molecules consist of an amphiphilic chain with a solvophilic head and a solvophobic tail. All molecules in the system, solvent and surfactant, are characterized by the Lennard-Jones (LJ) potential. Adjacent atoms along the surfactant chain are connected by finitely extensible harmonic springs. Solvent molecules move via the Metropolis random-walk algorithm, whereas surfactant molecules move according to the continuum configurational bias Monte Carlo (CBMC) method. We generate thermodynamic adsorption and surface-tension isotherms and compare results quantitatively to single-surfactant adsorption (Langmuir, 2007, 23, 1835). Surfactant tail groups with attractive interaction lead to cooperative adsorption at high surface coverage and higher maximum adsorption at the interface than those without. Moreover, adsorption and surface-tension isotherms with and without tail attraction are identical at low concentrations, deviating only near maximum coverage. Simulated binary mixtures of surfactants with differing lengths give intermediate behavior between that of the corresponding single-surfactant adsorption and surface-tension isotherms both with and without tail attraction. We successfully predict simulated mixture results with the thermodynamically consistent ideal adsorbed solution (IAS) theory for binary mixtures of unequal-sized surfactants using only the simulations from the single surfactants. Ultimately, we establish that a coarse-grained LJ surfactant system is useful for understanding actual surfactant systems when tail attraction is important and for unequal-sized mixtures of amphiphiles.