Research Status of Polyether Silicone Surfactants

Feb 23, 2021

 Surfactant and its properties
Substances that can significantly reduce the surface tension of water are called surfactants. In recent years, surfactants have developed rapidly, and their applications involve many fields, such as oil field development, daily chemical products, coatings, food, textiles, materials, etc. Surfactants have almost penetrated into all production and technical fields.

Surfactants have two important properties. They are directional adsorption on various interfaces, and the other is that they can form micelles inside the solution. The former property is the reason why many surfactants are used as emulsifiers, foaming agents, and wetting agents. The latter property is the reason for the common solubilization of surfactants.

Silicone surfactants.
Characteristics of silicone surfactants.As a new type of surface active agent, silicone surfactant has been developed rapidly since its development in the 1960s. Silicone surfactants have the following characteristics:
(1) Very high surface activity, its surface activity is second only to fluorine surfactant, and the lowest in aqueous solution.The surface tension can be reduced to about 20 mN/m, while a typical hydrocarbon surfactant is about 30 mN/m; (2) It has surface activity in both aqueous and non-aqueous systems; (3) It has excellent wetting on low-energy surfaces. Moisture capacity; (4) It has excellent defoaming ability and is a class of defoamers with excellent performance; (5) Usually has high thermal stability; (6) They are non-toxic and will not irritate the skin; ( 7) Abiotic degradation can occur under certain conditions, with few combustion by-products, and low environmental pollution; (8) According to different preparation methods, different molecular weights and different types of structures can be produced, and they are usually high molecular weights. Surfactant.

The use of silicone surfactants
Due to the excellent properties of silicone surfactants, they have been applied in many fields. As early as the 1950s, it was used as a foam stabilizer for urethane foam, and the amount used in this application alone reached about 300,000 t/a in 1994, which promoted the rapid development of the silicone surfactant industry. In recent years, researchers have synthesized more kinds of silicone surfactants, so that they have studied more and more systematically their surface activity in water and non-aqueous systems, the interaction with various additives, and The orderly combination behavior establishes the theoretical basis for its application in coatings, cosmetics, fiber and other industries. Although silicone surfactants also have the disadvantages of poor biodegradability and relatively high price, their high efficiency can make up for their lack of cost.
Three, polyether silicone surfactant

Overview
Among the silicone surfactants, polyether modified silicone surfactants have attracted widespread attention and can be used in industrial production and daily chemical products. It is made up of organic silicon segments and polyether segments connected by chemical bonds. By adjusting the degree of polymerization of polyether and silicone, silicone surfactants with different properties and uses can be obtained, which can be used in the coating industry, polyurethane,Pesticides and daily chemical industries.

Types of polyether silicone surfactants
According to the connection between the polyether segment and the silicone segment, polyether silicone surfactant.Divided into 510C key connection type and SEG key connection type. The former has poor water resistance and is easily hydrolyzed; the latter,The person is stable to water.

Research progress of polyether silicone surfactants
Polyether silicone surfactants first appeared in 1954. With the continuous deepening of research, this makes polyether silicone surfactants have made great progress. Many scholars abroad have studied
Phase behavior of polyether silicone surfactants.

Regarding the study-the group is clearly defined as the phase behavior of the AB type silicone polyether copolymer surfactant.Paper and found that these copolymers self-assemble to form microstructure materials, and have low weight average molecular weight.A crystalline phase is formed in the mixture of oil and water.
In terms of reaction solvents. For more than ten years, people have been committed to developing better, solvent-free and solvent-free process technology without removing the solvent from the reaction system. They used a hydroxyl-free ester as the reaction solvent for synthesis research, and the reaction resulted in a transparent viscous solution, which can be used without separation of the ester solution.

In terms of post-treatment process, by adding dilute hydrochloric acid at the end of the reaction for post-treatment, odorless products can be obtained. The hydrogenation method is used to obtain an odorless product. The reactant is dissolved in toluene for hydrogenation, and the product can be obtained after filtering and distilling out the toluene. The product has an unsaturation degree of about 0.01 mmol/g, has no odor and has good storage stability.