SURFACTANT STRUCTURE AND ITS RELATION TO THE KRAFFT POINT, CLOUD POINT AND MICELLIZATION - SOME EMPIRICAL RELATIONSHIPS

This paper establishes empirical relationships between Krafft points, cloud points, CMC values and the structural units in different surfactant molecules. For ionic surfactants there is a linear relationship between the Krafft point and the logarithm of CMC with constant negative slopes for different kind of homologues of surfactants with the same kind of counterion. For homologues of non-ionic surfactants an analogous linearity, but with positive slope, is valid between the cloud point and the logarithm of CMC. Obviously this reflects the delicate balance between the attraction and repulsion forces, responsible both for phase separation as well as micellization.