Researchers Clean Up With Distinguished Paper Award

Chemical Engineering Professor Edgar Acosta and graduate students Arti Bhakta and Jessica Yuan are recipients of the 2008 Soap and Detergent Association (SDA) Distinguished Paper Award.

The award recognizes the most outstanding research article published in the Journal of Surfactants and Detergents. The team won for their article, “The Characteristic Curvature of Ionic Surfactants,” which was published in the journal’s July 2008 edition.

“Surfactants are extremely versatile but largely misunderstood molecules,” said Acosta. “In our article, we described a simple method to characterize one of their properties – their relative hydrophilic/lipophilic nature.”

Hydrophilic surfactants love water, but lipophilic surfactants love oils and hate water.

“The new parameter, the ‘characteristic curvature,’ will tell you if a given surfactant is hydrophilic or lipophilic, but more importantly, you can use it to predict important properties of surfactant-oil-water systems,” said Acosta.

The research protocol developed by Acosta and his team builds on more than 30 years of phase behavior studies of microemulsions (the clear, stable liquid mixtures of oil, water and surfactant) and the concept of hydrophilic-lipophilic difference.

The award is sponsored by SDA and the Surfactants and Detergents Division of the American Oil Chemists’ Society (AOCS) and will be presented May 5th at AOCS’ 100th Annual Meeting and in Orlando, Florida.