Investigating the structural landscape of surfactant mixtures in polar nonaqueous solvents: Using SF-SANS to exploit the kinetics of large-scale structure formation

Self-assembly of amphiphiles is ubiquitous in a variety of applications from biological to industrial, where surfactants are used in a variety of formulations. In many formulations, like personal care and cleaning products, mixtures of surface-active molecules can be found, for instance a cationic surfactant for cleaning with a perfume such as geraniol. To optimise product efficiency and the material properties of the product, it is necessary to understand how combinations of these molecules may or may not form large-scale structures. Despite interesting behaviour observed in water, self-assembly of surfactant mixtures is not well understood in polar nonaqueous media. Here, we propose a time-resolved SANS (TR-SANS) study to investigate structural transformations that occur in nonaqueous media, as a function of surfactant concentration, surfactant architecture, and solvent composition. This experiment will inform us about the formation of large-scale structures from mixtures of surfactants in nonaqueous media and will also give us valuable insights into the formation mechanism of these structures. The observations here would be important fundamentally, to help further our understanding of self-assembly in nonaqueous media. These insights are also important to industries, such as formulation science, where mixtures of surfactants are ubiquitous.