A zwitterionic surfactant concentrates sulfolane in floating foams, to purify water
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Sulfolane is a worldwide groundwater miscible pollutant, used for carbon capture and sour gas treatment. It is heavier than water and can sink when spilled in low salinity aquifers, posing remedial challenges. There are no strategies to prevent sulfolane plunging, other than pumping large groundwater volumes. We show that the zwitterionic surfactant cocamidopropyl betaine (CAPB) interacts with sulfolane, producing a stable floating foam, in which sulfolane is concentrated by >140 %. The foam forms by bubbling air or mild mixing. CAPB is surface active in either water or in aqueous sulfolane mixtures, and its films stabilize the air-water interface even upon significant deformation. CAPB-sulfolane interactions disrupt the water network, thereby decreasing the heat and onset of water evaporation from the foam. While CAPB successfully concentrated sulfolane, Tween 20 did not. Cationic cetyltrimethylammonium bromide binds sulfolane, but extraction of sulfolane was not possible due to foam instability. • Sulfolane is a worldwide groundwater miscible pollutant. • Sulfolane is heavier than water and plunges, with risks to low-salinity aquifers. • Cocoamidopropyl betaine (CAPB) stabilizes foam in aqueous sulfolane solutions. • CAPB concentrates sulfolane in the floating foam by >140 %, cleaning water. • Water vaporization is promoted from foams containing water+sulfolane+CAPB.
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Full frame distilled prediction
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) | 0.001 | 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