Highly CO2-Soluble Surfactants for Supercritical Fluid Reaction, Separation & Impregnation Process

环境的良性影响和可调的组合 溶剂能力导致了各种各样的萃取/分离 超临界二氧化碳的应用。 尽管有这些 固有的优点，高极性或低溶解度， 非极性CO2中的亲水性化合物阻碍了 超临界流体技术在蛋白质等领域 净化，重金属污染的修复， 和非VOC基涂料配方，其中产生的 高纯度和易于回收的产品将是 重大进展。 其他团体最近的研究表明， 表明在超临界流体中胶束的形成 提供了一种方法，通过该方法， 可以克服非极性流体。 尽管取得了这一进展， 在CO2中形成稳定的胶束（与烷烃相反） 仍然是难以捉摸的，主要是由于低溶解度 二氧化碳中的市售表面活性剂. 适度的压力。 因此，本项目建议综合 模型两亲物，其中“疏水”尾部包含 官能团，如氟醚和硅氧烷， 已知有利地相互作用（在热力学意义上） 与二氧化碳。 在大学的初步结果 匹兹堡，含氟烷基、氟醚和硅酮 事实证明，这一前提是成立的。 这 该项目通过一个程序扩展了这些成功的应用程序 表面活性剂的合理合成与相行为 问题研究

The combination of benign environmental impact and tuneable solvent power has led to a variety of extraction/separation applications for supercritical carbon dioxide. Despite these inherent advantages, the low solubility of highly polar or hydrophilic compounds in non-polar CO2 has blocked the use of supercritical fluid technology in areas such as protein purification, the remediation of heavy metal contamination, and non-VOC based coatings formulations, where generation of a highly pure and readily recoverable product would be a significant advance. Recent research by other groups has shown that the formation of micelles in supercritical fluids provides a means by which low solubility of polar compounds in non-polar fluids can be overcome. Despite this advance, formation of stable micelles in CO2 (as opposed to alkanes) has remained elusive, due primarily to the low solubility of commercially-available surfactants in carbon dioxide at moderate pressures. Thus this project proposes to synthesize model amphiphiles where the "hydrophobic" tails contain functional groups, such as fluoroethers and silicones, which are known to interact favorably (in a thermodynamic sense) with carbon dioxide. Preliminary results at the University of Pittsburgh with fluoroalkyl, fluoroether, and silicone materials show that this premise is indeed valid. This project extends these successful preliminaries with a program of rational synthesis of surfactants and phase behavior studies.