The vast majority of surfactants used in the home and personal care industries today are derived from petrochemical building blocks; however, surfactants produced from bio-sourced raw materials and sustainable processes are growing in importance to brand owners and end-use consumers. Current approaches to formulate products for these markets involve blending specific anionic, zwitterionic and/or non-ionic surfactants where synergies between surfactants are critical to drive the desired balance of properties. Therefore, understanding how new biosurfactant materials interact in mixed surfactant systems used in formulations is an important aspect for bringing new materials to market. At Dow, integrated high-throughput liquid formulation and surfactant characterization capabilities provide powerful approaches to tackle this challenge, both from a fundamental property and end-use performance perspective. This talk will provide an overview of the suite of high-throughput capabilities at Dow: we will describe how customized workflows can be developed that enable large libraries of surfactant blends to be rapidly formulated, and their physical properties (e.g. CMC, surface dynamics, rheology) and critical performance metrics (e.g. foaming, solubility, cleaning) characterized. Statistical modelling approaches are used to map out physical property trends and predict performance across large mixture spaces. Overall, these tools enable us to gain a powerful fundamental understanding of biosurfactant behavior in complex surfactant mixtures, which is key for bringing next generation of biosurfactant technologies to market.

Understanding biosurfactant blends through high-throughput research

Fall 2022 abstracts, posters, and presentations will launch in mid-September.

ACS Fall 2022

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.