Effects Of Short-chain Alcohols On Single-phase Microemulsion Structure And Materials Synthesis

Microemulsions are two or more immiscible liquids stabilized byadding a surfactant. These microscopic heterogeneous systemscan dissolve polar and non-polar substances. Materials synthesizedby microemulsions have excellent performance which becoming ahot research on materials synthesis. Microemulsions have beenapplied to many fields such as chemical reactions, materialsscience and pharmaceutical industry. Structure of themicroemulsions is an area of current interest. This paperstudies the structure and properties of Triton X-100/alcohol/iso-octane/water systems formed with the n-butanol, pentanol,hexanol, and discuss the microstructure of the single-phasemicroemulsions formed with different short-chain alcohols.On thisbasis, we synthesized nanoparticles through W/O microemulsions.Details are as follows:Chapter I conclude the background of the work, which includes basic concepts and classifications of the microemulsions, as wellas the knowledge and background of microemulsion dilutionmethod and microemulsions as a template as synthesizingnanoparticles, all of this provides the topic ideas of the research.In chapter II、III、IV, we discussed the different structure andproperties of Triton X-100/alcohol/iso-octane/water systemsconstructed by different co-surfactant,n-butanol, pentanol andhexanol.Firstly, we analysed the phase behavior of each system. Thebest conditions to form a stable Triton X-100/alcohol/iso-octane/water system were studied. Based on which we achieved thepseudo-ternary phase diagrams for further study of their propertiesand structures.Secondly, the conductivity of the microemulsions wereinvestigated and three single-phase microregions, water-in-oil(W/O),bicontinuous and oil-in-water(O/W) were identified by conductivitymeasurements, which was used to discuss the structure and theirchange of the microemulsions.Then, the structural parameters of the systems were calculatedthrough the dilution method theoretically, such as the water coreradius Rw, particle effective radius Re, the total number of particlesNd, dispersed phase total interfacial area Ad, the average aggregation number n, the interfacial layer thickness l, and the freeenergy change of the alcohol shift from the continuous phase tointerfacial layer ΔG0c�'i. It provides a method to study the impact ofvarious factors of microemulsion structure parameterssystematically.Finally, we prepared CaCO3and BaSO4nanoparticles usedmicroemulsions as the template, and characterized the particlesthrough scanning electron microscope (SEM) and X-ray powderdiffraction (XRD). It indicated that there were correspondingrelation between the microemulsions template and themorphologies and sizes of the nanoparticles.Chapter V concluded the research work of this paper. Based onthe research of the microstructure and synthetic nanomaterials,we found short-chain alcohols have a significant impact on thestructure and properties of microemulsion systems. And we mayhave a more in-depth research for the further work.