EFFECTS OF CHAIN-LENGTH OF SURFACTANTS ON THE INTERFACIAL-TENSION - MOLECULAR-DYNAMICS SIMULATIONS AND EXPERIMENTS

In this letter a simple oil/water/surfactant model is presented. This model allows us to study systematically, using the molecular dynamics technique, the relation between the structure of surfactants and various thermodynamic properties. Specifically, the effect of increasing the hydrophobic tail length on the interfacial tension has been studied. Experimental results on various model surfactants are also presented and compared with molecular dynamics calculations. The experimental data as well as the simulations indicate that increasing the tail length makes the surfactants more effective in decreasing the interfacial tension at low concentration. © 1990 American Chemical Society.