Modeling the Micellization Behavior of Fluorosurfactants using Molecular-Thermodynamic Theory

Fluorinated surfactants are an important class of surfactants because they possess properties that are far superior than those of their hydrocarbon analogs. As a result, they find use in a wide variety of applications including in paints, polishes, fire-fighting foams, and emulsion polymerization. However, concerns regarding the non-biodegradability and toxicity of fluorinated surfactants have prompted the search for new benign alternative surfactant formulations that possess properties that are comparable to those of traditional fluorinated surfactants. With this need in mind, this thesis focuses on gaining a molecular-level understanding of the micellization behavior of traditional fluorinated surfactants, and then using the acquired knowledge to design novel surfactant formulations that can reduce the use of fluorinated surfactants. Molecular-thermodynamic (MT) models were developed to calculate the various contributions to the free energy of micellization for discoidal and biaxial ellipsoidal micelle, two important micelle shapes in the context of fluorocarbon-based surfactants. These models explicitly incorporate the effect of the position-dependent curvature associated with discs and biaxial ellipsoids. Comparison between the models developed here with those that do not explicitly account for the varying curvature shows that accounting for the position-dependent curvature is extremely important in modeling these two micelle shapes. The new MT model for the free energy of micellization is also used to demonstrate the feasibility of realizing biaxial ellipsoidal micelles, a result refuted in the past in many theoretical studies on the basis of average geometrical properties of the micelle. A new computer-simulation-molecular-thermodynamic (CSMT) framework was developed to predict the micellization behavior of mixtures of fluorocarbon-based surfactants. To facilitate the practical implementation of the mixture CSMT framework, which involves the computationally intensive task of simulating several mixed micelles, an approximation to the mixture CSMT model was developed. In this approximation, relevant properties for a mixed micelle are estimated using a micelle-composition based weighted average of the analogous properties obtained from simulations of the single-component surfactant micelles for each of the surfactants comprising the mixture. Therefore, in this approximation, the need for simulating mixed micelles is eliminated. The approximation was found to compare well