The Cloud Point of Alkyl Ethoxylates and Its Prediction with the Hydrophilic–Lipophilic Difference (HLD) Framework
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
The hydrophobicity of surfactants has been described through different concepts used to guide the formulation of surfactant-water (SW) and surfactant-oil-water (SOW) systems. An integrated framework of hydrophobicity indicators could provide a complete tool for surfactant characterization, and insights on how their relationship may influence the overall phase behavior of the system. The hydrophilic-lipophilic difference (HLD) and the characteristic curvature (Cc) parameter, included in the HLD, have been shown to correlate with different hydrophobicity indicators including the hydrophilic-lipophilic balance (HLB), packing factor (Pf), phase inversion temperature (PIT), spontaneous curvature (Ho), surfactant partition (K(o-w)), and the critical micelle concentration (CMC). This work aims to investigate whether the HLD can further describe a concomitant hydrophobicity parameter, the cloud point (CP) of alkyl ethoxylates. After applying group contribution models to calculate the Cc of monodisperse (pure) nonionic alkyl ethoxylates, a linear correlation between the calculated Cc and the CP was observed for pure surfactants with 8 ethylene oxide (EO) units or less. Furthermore, using an apparent equivalent alkane carbon number (EACN) to represent the hydrophobicity of the micelle core, the HLD equation was capable of predicting cloud point temperatures of pure alkyl ethoxylates, typically within 5 °C. Polydisperse surfactants did not follow the linear CP-Cc correlation found for pure surfactants. After treating polydisperse samples using a liquid-liquid extraction procedure used to remove the most hydrophobic components in the mixture, the resulting treated surfactants fell in the correlation line of pure alkyl ethoxylates. A closer look at the partition behavior of these treated surfactants showed that their partition, Cc and cloud point are dominated by the most abundant ethoxymers in the treated surfactant. The HLD also predicted the cloud point depression of treated surfactants with increasing sodium chloride concentration. This work shows how the HLD framework could be extended to predict the behavior of SW systems.
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Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it