Vegetable
oil-based microemulsification not only reduces the high
viscosity of vegetable oils but also enhances the miscibility of polar
and oil phases. In addition, vegetable oil-based microemulsion fuels
produce lower pollutant emissions compared to neat No.2 diesel. Since
the stability of microemulsion fuels is temperature sensitive, the
effect of temperature on the microemulsion phase behavior should be
evaluated. The overall goal of this study is to formulate temperature-robust
microemulsion fuels by studying the effect of temperature on phase
behaviors of different systems of vegetable oil-based reverse micelle
microemulsions. Our results demonstrate that, when using an alcohol
ethoxylate surfactant as a renewable surfactant, it is possible to
formulate microemulsion fuels with comparable properties to nonionic
surfactant evaluated in previous studies. Further, mixtures of nonedible
oil (algae mixed with castor) were found to have comparable properties
to edible oil (canola) used to produce microemulsion fuels. Moreover,
microemulsion fuels can be obtained using bioethanol although the
bioethanol systems required a higher amount of surfactant than anhydrous
ethanol. All microemulsion fuel systems were able to function at low
temperature without phase separation. Thus, this study provides useful
information and alternatives of optimum microemulsion fuel formulations
based on surfactants and oils not evaluated in previous research and
thus demonstrates the robustness of this approach.
In spite of the increasing interest in cold temperature detergency of vegetable oils and fats, very limited research has been published on this topic. Extended surfactants have recently been shown to produce very promising detergency with vegetable oils at ambient temperature. However, the excessive salinity requirement (4-14 %) for these surfactants has limited their use in practical applications. In this work, we investigated the mixture of a linear C 10 -18PO-2EO-NaSO 4 extended surfactant and a hydrophobic twin-tailed sodium dioctyl sulfosuccinate surfactant for cold temperature detergency of vegetable oils and semi-solid fats. Four vegetable oils of varying melting points (from -10 to 28°C) were studied, these were canola, jojoba, coconut and palm kernel oils. Anionic surfactant mixtures showed synergism in detergency performance compared to single surfactant systems. At temperatures above the melting point, greater than 90 % detergency was achieved at 0.5 % NaCl. While detergency performance decreased at temperatures below the melting point, it was still superior to that of a commercial detergent (up to 80 vs. 40 %). Further, results show that the experimental microemulsion phase behaviors correlated very well with predictions from the hydrophilic-lipophilic deviation concept.
In this work, the impacts of extended surfactant structure (number of polypropylene oxide PO groups and branching nature of the hydrocarbon chain) on microemulsion formation and IFT values were examined with triglyceride oils. The results show that branching of the hydrocarbon tail of extended surfactants lowers optimum salinity and IFT values. The results also show that for the surfactants studied ultralow IFTs and microemulsion formation with vegetable oils can be achieved using extended surfactants with at least eight PO groups.
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