Wen B, Bai B, Larson RG. Surfactant desorption and scission free energies for cylindrical and spherical micelles from umbrella-sampling molecular dynamics simulations.
J Colloid Interface Sci 2021;
599:773-784. [PMID:
33989930 DOI:
10.1016/j.jcis.2021.04.138]
[Citation(s) in RCA: 9] [Impact Index Per Article: 3.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/23/2021] [Revised: 04/27/2021] [Accepted: 04/28/2021] [Indexed: 11/28/2022]
Abstract
HYPOTHESIS
The free energies associated with adsorption/desorption of individual surfactants from micelles and the fusion/scission of long micelles can be used to estimate the rate constants for micellar kinetics as functions of surfactant and salt concentration.
EXPERIMENTS
We compute the escape free energies △Gesc of surfactant from micelles and the scission free energies △Gsciss of long micelles from coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulations coupled with umbrella sampling, for micelles of both sodium dodecylsulfate (SDS) in sodium chloride (NaCl) and cetyltrimethylammonium chloride (CTAC) in sodium salicylate (NaSal).
FINDINGS
For spherical micelles, △Gesc values have maxima at certain aggregation numbers, and at salt-to-surfactant molar concentration ratios R near unity, consistent with experiments. For cylindrical micelles, SDS/NaCl shows a minimum, and CTAC/NaSal a maximum in △Gesc, both at R ~ 0.7, while △Gsciss of CTAC micelles also peaks at around R ~ 0.7 and that of SDS micelles increases monotonically with R. We explain the non-monotonic dependence of escape and scission free energies on R by a combination of electrostatic screening and the decrease of micelle radius with increasing R. Transitions from predominantly spherical to cylindrical micelles, and between adsorption/desorption and fusion/scission kinetics with changing salt concentration can be inferred from the free energies for CTAC/NaSal.
Collapse