Solute uptake in microstructured soft materials is a reoccurring theme across several fields. For personal care or household cleaning formulations, one may be concerned with controlling uptake of additives in surfactant assemblies and mitigating their effect on the stability of these assemblies. In drug delivery, one may be interested in development of an optimal vehicle to transport a relatively non-polar pharmaceutical compound through an aqueous medium. Regardless of application, however, several questions arise about the challenge of tuning solute uptake: Do solutes distribute preferentially into certain regions of surfactant assemblies and how does solute uptake affect micellar and mesophase structure? How do these changes vary with the chemical functionality of solutes and how does introduction of additional components influence solute uptake and assembly stability? The present work addresses these questions for nonpolar and polar additives (n-nonane, ethyl butyrate, and 1-hexanol) in a bilayer system containing nonionic oligo(ethylene glycol) alkyl ether surfactants. These systems are studied through the use of configurational-bias Monte Carlo simulations in the constant-stress, osmotic Gibbs ensemble that allows for prediction of solute uptake at a given bulk concentration and concomitant change of the bilayer structure (interfacial area and thickness).

Partitioning of organic solutes into bilayers formed by non-ionic surfactants

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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