Quaternary water in oil microemulsions. 1. Effect of alcohol chain length and concentration on droplet size and exchange of material between droplets

Abstract

Water solubility, electrical conductivity, and time-resolved fluorescence quenching measurements have been performed in water/chlorobenzene/cationic surfactants/1-alcohol water-in-oil (w/o) microemulsions in order to investigate the effect of alcohol chain length and concentration on various properties of these systems: surfactant aggregation number, N, per aggregate; radius, R{sub w}, of the droplet water core; intensity of attractive interdroplet interactions; onset of percolation of electrical conductivity; and rate constant, k{sub e}, for the exchange of material between droplets through collisions with temporary merging. The variations of these properties with the molar concentration ratio {omega} = (water)/(surfactant) for alcohols of increasing chain length are strikingly similar to those found when investigating the effect of surfactant chain length. In particular, N and R{sub w} and the intensity of attractive interactions decrease when the alcohol chain length increases as predicted by current theory of the stability of w/o microemulsions. For a series of microemulsions based on alkyltrimethylammonium bromide surfactants, the water solubility results indicate that the stability of the microemulsions containing short chain alcohols (propanol, butanol) is determined by the attractive interdroplet interactions. The results give support to the mechanism postulated for electrical conductivity above the percolation threshold, namely, motion of counterions through transient water tubes formed inmore » the droplet clusters present in the systems. Finally, it is shown that simple electrical conductivity and water solubility measurements can yield of quantitative information about the investigated microemulsions.« less