Light scattering study of solubilization of organic molecules by block copolymer micelles in aqueous media

Abstract

Block copolymers, when dissolved in a selective solvent, form spherical micelles. These micelles can selectively solubilize organic molecules otherwise insoluble in the pure solvent. In this study, we report solubilization of organic molecules by styrene‐methacrylic acid block copolymer micelles in aqueous buffers. A light scattering technique was developed to determine the extent of micellar solubilization. Our results indicate that the extent of micellar solubilization depends on the chemical nature of organic molecules, specifically, on the interactions between the organic compound and polystyrene. A thermodynamic model has been developed to describe micellar solubilization. The theoretical calculation agrees reasonably well with the experimental results for two micellar samples examined. ©1995 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Comparison of Solubilization of Hydrocarbons in (PEO–PPO) Diblock versus (PEO–PPO–PEO) Triblock Copolymer Micelles

“…Any excess hydrocarbon copolymer system in Ref. (10). We note, however, that its decomposition into core radius and corona thickness is not centration X * 1J .…”

“…In a homogeneities in the corona region (7) or in both the core recent study, such a correlation has been found to describe and the corona regions (8) have also been formulated in our well the experimental solubilization data for aliphatic, aroearlier studies. The former model is based on a mean-field matic, cyclic, and chlorinated hydrocarbons and esters in description, whereas the latter theory is based on a scaling poly(styrene) -poly(methacrylic acid) block copolymer approach exploiting the analogy between spherical micelles micelles (10). This empirical correlation suggests that soluand star polymers.…”

“…ͬ [10] where q Å 1 for an AB diblock copolymer and q Å 2 for a BAB triblock copolymer having a middle hydrophobic block. The parameter p is dependent on aggregate shape and has the value of 3 for spherical micelles (7).…”

Polyvinylpyrrolidone Adsorption and Structural Studies on Homoionic Li-, Na-, K-, and Cs-Montmorillonite Colloidal Suspensions

“…The relative increase of the absorbance (A r ) in the presence of PVP is thus defined (35) with [12] and [13] by…”

Polymeric Micelles

“…Increasing the core block length positively affects micelle stability, but also drug encapsulation efficiency (Xing and Mattice 1997;Tian et al 1995;Elhasi et al 2007). This effect is ascribed to the increase in core volume, hence increased capacity for drug incorporation (Xing and Mattice 1997;Tian et al 1995;Shuai et al 2004b;Elhasi et al 2007;Aliabadi et al 2007). For Poly(ethylene glycol)poly(ε-caprolactone) (PEG-PCL) micelles it was indeed shown that increasing the PCL block length while keeping the PEG block constant, resulted in increased micelle size and drug loading content (Elhasi et al 2007).…”