Pulse radiolysis study of redox reactions of safranine T in sodium dodecylsulphate (SDS) micellar medium

Abstract

Reaction of hydrated electrons with safranine T (SF+), a phenazine dye useful as sensitizer in photogalvanic cell and the transient semireduced species formed by this reaction have been studied in SDS micellar medium using the technique of pulse radiolysis. Thee aq − reaction with SF+ in the micellar environment was only marginally slower (5.1 × 109 dm3 mol−1 s−1) as compared to that in homogeneous aqueous medium (2.2 × 1010 dm3 mol−1 s−1) explicable on the basis of our finding that although a large fraction of the dye gets localized near the micelle Stern layer where the molecule experiences a dielectric.constant of ≈40, a small but significant concentration of the dye exists in the aqueous bulk as charge pair complex with the anionic surfactant monomer (association constant for the formation of the complex being 2.8 × 104 dm3 mol−1). The transient semireduced absorption band observed in the micellar medium showed a red shift of ≈ 50 nm and also the decay of the transient, which was very fast with 2k = 1 × 109 dm3 mol−1 s−1 in aqueous medium, was stable in the SDS micellar medium over a few tens of milliseconds suggesting that the radical is incorporated deeper than the parent molecule in the SDS micelle. The effect of this stability on the photogalvanic conversion needs to be examined.