Nanoemulsions, nanosized oil-water dispersions, have garnered a good deal of attention for their application as drug delivery vehicles, potential membrane models, in material synthesis, and much more. However, due to the buried nature of their interfaces, molecularly specific information of the structure of this region is lacking. This study reports the use of vibrational sum-frequency scattering spectroscopy (VSFSS) conducted on 200 nm nanoemulsion droplets stabilized by cetyltrimethylammonium bromide (CTAB). The alkyl chain ordering and headgroup spectroscopy for CTAB adsorbed at the planar oil water interface using reflection VSFS provides an interesting comparison. Complementary computational efforts, combining MD simulations with DFT calculations to generate calculated sum-frequency spectra for comparison with experiment will also be discussed. Given CTAB’s relatively large size a molecular tailoring approach developed for DFT calculations will be discussed. These calculations build on the computational approach previously used successfully in this laboratory on simpler systems.

Untangling the details of surfactant assembly at the nanoemulsion interface

255th National Meeting (2018)

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