ISIS Neutron and Muon Source Data Journal

Unusual self-assembly of bicephalous surfactants: Nanomorphology and nanostructure from SANS

Abstract: A novel class of surfactants have been synthesized ? which we term bicephalous surfactants, with two quaternary ammonium headgroups linked by a C2 linker and 1 or 2 Cn-acyl tails connected to one of the headgroups. These bicephalous surfactants exhibit remarkable thermoresponsive and rheological behavior. For instance, the single-tailed C18-DQA undergoes reversible thermally-induced gelation-fluidization at ~ the body temperature. It is particularly unusual and perplexing that gelation would occur upon heating, in contrast to other small-molecule gels. Both trial SANS and cryo-TEM results indicated formation elongated aggregates. The zero-shear viscosity of the 800 mM C18-DQA solution would increase from 0.02 Pa s to 100,000 Pa s, by 7-8 orders of magnitude upon gelation. These striking observations from low molecular weight molecules are completely new and could open up significant potential applications. Here, we propose a first SANS study of the nanostructure and nanomorphology of self-assembled bicephalous surfactants, systematically varying the molecular architecture (sing tail and double tail of different lengths) and temperature.

Principal Investigator: Professor Wuge Briscoe
Experimenter: Dr Magdalena Wlodek
Experimenter: Mr Tao Ma
Experimenter: Dr Sarah Rogers
Local Contact: Dr Lauren Matthews
Experimenter: Miss Xueying Guo
Experimenter: Mr Matteo Fois
Experimenter: Dr Binglei Song
Experimenter: Mr Francesco Vicentini
Experimenter: Miss Anyi Ropero Barrera
Experimenter: Miss Elena Venturelli

DOI: 10.5286/ISIS.E.RB2410629

ISIS Experiment Number: RB2410629

Publisher: STFC ISIS Neutron and Muon Source

Data format: RAW/Nexus
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Data Citation

The recommended format for citing this dataset in a research publication is as:
[author], [date], [title], [publisher], [doi]

For Example:
Professor Wuge Briscoe et al; (2024): Unusual self-assembly of bicephalous surfactants: Nanomorphology and nanostructure from SANS, STFC ISIS Neutron and Muon Source, https://doi.org/10.5286/ISIS.E.RB2410629

Data is released under the CC-BY-4.0 license.