Presenter: Riley Cowen — Chemistry
Faculty Mentor(s): Konnor Jones
Session: (In-Person) Poster Presentation
Oil-water interfaces are present in many household products that you use daily, from cosmetics to detergents to drugs, these products change according to their interfacial properties, which can be manipulated be the choice of surfactants at the oil-water interface. A change of the interfacial properties is done in this experiment though mixing a cationic and an anionic surfactant, making the charge at the interface change depending on how much of each is added. The effective stability of these ratios will be measured using the zeta potential and the PDI taken over several weeks. This experiment is based off results found at the planar interface, where there is no charge, and the results are compared to better understand the difference between these interfaces. The solutions made for this experiment have a very small net charge, on the scale of milli molar. I will be using SDS and DTAB mixtures and varying the amount of DTAB to show the change on the charge at the interface, seeing that these surfactants are oppositely charged.