Rheology and phase separation were investigated for aqueous mixtures of two oppositely charged hydrophobically modified polyelectrolytes. The typical phase separation, normally seen for oppositely charged polymer mixtures, is dramatically reduced by the presence of hydrophobic modification, and phase separation is only detected close to the point of charge neutralization. While the two polyelec...

The synthesis and basic properties of 2-ethylhexanol based innovative nonionic surfactants are described in this paper. 2-Ethylhexanol as an available and relatively inexpensive raw material was used as the hydrophobe source modified by propoxylation and followed by polyethoxylation. As the result, six series of 2-ethylhexyl alcohol polyalkoxylates (EHP m E n ) were obtained with three steps of...

Hydrogen-bonding and intra/intermolecular vibrational coupling of water next to a hydrophobic molecule (tert-butyl alcohol, TBA) have been studied by Raman multivariate curve resolution (Raman-MCR) and isotopic dilution spectroscopy. Raman-MCR provides the vibrational spectrum of water pertinent to the hydration shell of TBA, which shows a distinct Raman band at around 3660 cm(-1) corresponding...

The adsorption of ions to aqueous interfaces is a phenomenon that profoundly influences vital processes in many areas of science, including biology, atmospheric chemistry, electrical energy storage, and water process engineering. Although classical electrostatics theory predicts that ions are repelled from water/hydrophobe (e.g., air/water) interfaces, both computer simulations and experiments ...

Differences in the extent of protonation of functional groups lying on either side of water-hydrophobe interfaces are deemed essential to enzymatic catalysis, molecular recognition, bioenergetic transduction, and atmospheric aerosol-gas exchanges. The sign and range of such differences, however, remain conjectural. Herein we report experiments showing that gaseous carboxylic acids RCOOH(g) begi...