Soapnut Extract as a Natural Surfactant for Enhanced Oil Recovery

Natural surfactant extracted from Sapindus mukurossi as an eco-friendly alternate to synthetic surfactant – a dye surfactant interaction study

“…The chemical formula for saponins obtained from the soapnut fruit as reported in literature are shown in Table 1 (Chhetri et al, 2009;Li et al, 2013;Huang et al, 2003Huang et al, , 2008. The percent compositions of the elements present in saponins were 51% O, 44% C, and 6% H. As saponins are the surface active agents Kommalapati et al, 1997;Song et al, 2008;Chhetri et al, 2009), so their concentration of critical micelle formation was found to be 0.1%. The nature of saponins was considered as weakly acidic in nature.…”

“…Saponins are the organic compounds which contain glycosides with nonsugar aglycone. They resemble to sterol (Chhetri et al, 2009;Oleszek and Bialy, 2006). The specie used in the recent study is S. mukurossi which is also known as soapnut tree.…”

“…It can also be used for soil remediation (Conte et al, 2005). Saponins are used for washing of soil , the removal of heavy metals from soil (Song et al, 2008), soil remediation Kosaric, 2001;Hong et al, 2002), and enhanced oil recovery (Chhetri et al, 2009). …”

“…They are available in large quantities and are also very effective in extreme conditions like temperature, pH and salinity. Natural surfactants can be very effectively used in environmental control (Kosaric, 2001;Rahman and Gakpe, 2008;Chhetri et al, 2009).…”

Aqueous Solubility Enhancement and Desorption of Sudan III Dye from Contaminated Soil Using Plant Based Natural Surfactant

“…Recently, the natural surfactant obtained from pericarp of Sapindus mukorossi was used for understanding the interactions with congo red [21], neutral red [22], methylene blue and eosin yellow [23]. Further, this is used to understand its ability to solubilize vegetable oils [24], for the preparation of nanoparticles [15,25], for understanding surface and foam characteristics of saponins [26], synthesis of monodisperse lattices [27], surfactant enhanced oil recovery [28], solubilization of naphthalene [29], removal of phenolic compounds [30] and for solubilization of foreign materials present in muga silk [31]. Seed of soapnuts produce non-edible oil that can be used as biodiesel [32].…”