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Protocol for Studying Aqueous Foams Stabilized by Surfactant Mixtures

  • Original Article
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Journal of Surfactants and Detergents

Abstract

Even though foams have been the subject of intensive investigations over the last decades, many important questions related to their properties remain open. This concerns in particular foams which are stabilized by mixtures of surfactants. The present study deals with the fundamental question: which are the important parameters one needs to consider if one wants to characterize foams properly? We give an answer to this question by providing a measuring protocol which we apply to well-known surfactant systems. The surfactants of choice are the two non-ionic surfactants n-dodecyl-β-d-maltoside (β-C12G2) and hexaethyleneglycol monododecyl ether (C12E6) as well as their 1:1 mixture. Following the suggested protocol, we generated data which allow discussion of the influence of the surfactant structure and of the composition on the time evolution of the foam volume, the liquid fraction, the bubble size and the bubble size distribution. This paper shows that different foam properties can be assigned to different surfactant structures, which is the crucial point if one wants to tailor-make surfactants for specific applications.

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Notes

  1. Foamability describes the ability of a surfactant solution to produce a certain foam volume in a given period of time and is therefore an important foam property.

  2. These observations agree quantitatively with those reported in our previous work [9]. However, with the set-up used in [9] it was difficult to reproduce data and thus these data are much less reliable than those reported here.

  3. We would once again like to point out that in relation to foam generation the behavior of the 1:1 mixture resembled that of β-C12G2 (see Fig. 3). We will discuss this difference in Sect. 3.3.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Universität Stuttgart, Institut für Physikalische Chemie, Pfaffenwaldring 55, 70569, Stuttgart, Germany

    Julia Boos & Cosima Stubenrauch

  2. Laboratoire de Physique des Solides, UMR 8502, Université Paris-Sud, Bâtiment 510, 91405, Orsay Cedex, France

    Wiebke Drenckhan

Authors
  1. Julia Boos
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  2. Wiebke Drenckhan
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  3. Cosima Stubenrauch
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Correspondence to Cosima Stubenrauch.

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Boos, J., Drenckhan, W. & Stubenrauch, C. Protocol for Studying Aqueous Foams Stabilized by Surfactant Mixtures. J Surfact Deterg 16, 1–12 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11743-012-1416-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11743-012-1416-2

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