Micellar rate effects in the alkaline fading of crystal violet in the presence of various surfactants

Is Micellar Catalysis Green Chemistry?

Many years ago, twelve principles were defined for carrying out chemical reactions and processes from a green chemistry perspective. It is everyone's endeavor to take these points into account as far as possible when developing new processes or improving existing ones. Especially in the field of organic synthesis, a new area of research has thus been established: micellar catalysis. This review article addresses the question of whether micellar catalysis is green chemistry by applying the twelve principles to micellar reaction media. The review shows that many reactions can be transferred from an organic solvent to a micellar medium, but that the surfactant also has a crucial role as a solubilizer. Thus, the reactions can be carried out in a much more environmentally friendly manner and with less risk. Moreover, surfactants are being reformulated in their design, synthesis, and degradation to add extra advantages to micellar catalysis to match all the twelve principles of green chemistry.

Heterogeneous Charged Complexes of Random Copolymers for the Segregation of Organic Molecules

Nature harnesses the disorder of intrinsically disordered proteins to organize enzymes and biopolymers into membraneless organelles. The heterogeneous nature of synthetic random copolymers with charged, polar, and hydrophobic groups has been exploited to mimic intrinsically disordered proteins, forming complexes with enzymatically active proteins and delivering them into nonbiological environments. Here, the properties of polyelectrolyte complexes composed of two random copolymer polyelectrolytes are studied experimentally and via simulation with the aim of exploiting such complexes for segregating organic molecules from water. The anionic polyelectrolyte contains hydrophilic and hydrophobic side chains and forms self-assembled hydrophobic domains. The cationic polymer is a high-molecular-weight copolymer of hydrophilic and charged side groups and acts as a flocculant. We find that the polyelectrolyte complexes obtained with this anionic and cationic random copolymer system are capable of absorbing small cationic, anionic, and hydrophobic organic molecules, including perfluorooctanoic acid, a compound of great environmental and toxicologic concern. Importantly, these macroscopic complexes can be easily removed from water, thereby providing a simple approach for organic contaminant removal in aqueous media. MARTINI and coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulations explore how the microscale heterogeneity of these random copolymer complexes relates to their segregation functionality.

A simple and highly sensitive assay of perfluorooctanoic acid based on resonance light scattering technique

A simple, highly sensitive resonance light scattering (RLS) method for the detection of perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) has been developed based on the interaction with crystal violet (CV). It was found that PFOA can form complexes with CV in acid medium resulting in remarkable enhancement of the RLS intensity of the system. And the enhanced RLS intensities are in proportion to the concentration of PFOA in the range of 0.1-25.0 μmol/L (R(2)=0.9998), with a detection limit of 11.0 nmol/L (S/N=3). In this work, the optimum reaction conditions and the interferences of foreign substances were investigated. The reaction mechanism between CV and PFOA was also studied by the absorption spectrum and scanning electron microscope (SEM). This method is successfully applied to the determination of PFOA in tap water and Jialing river water samples with RSD≤4.04%.