A Soft Matter paper published today has been highlighted by the BBC on their website. The paper, by Julian Eastoe and co-workers, has expanded on a previous study to make magnetically responsive emulsions with magnetic surfactant stabilisers.
As the team says, compared to nanoparticle-stabilised magnetic emulsions, a major advantage of these magnetic surfactants is the simple synthesis and purification, offering new possibilities for molecular design of specialist surfactants. For example, replacing the surfactant alkyl tails with fluorocarbons could result in supercritical CO2-compatible magnetic responsive emulsions for oil and gas field flooding.
Read the Soft Matter paper for free here:
Magnetic emulsions with responsive surfactants
Paul Brown, Craig P. Butts, Jing Cheng, Julian Eastoe, Christopher A. Russell and Gregory N. Smith
Soft Matter, 2012, Advance Article, DOI: 10.1039/C2SM26077H
