Mesoscopic simulation study on the efficiency of surfactants adsorbed at the liquid/liquid interface

Surfactant monolayers at the interface between oil and water has been simulated using dissipative particle dynamics (DPD) technique. With a simple coarse-grained model, how variations in structure of surfactants influence their ability to reduce the interfacial tension has been investigated. The result shows that strong hydrophilic head groups are beneficial to make surfactant molecules more stretched and ordered, and help to enhance the efficiency of surfactant at the interface, it is beneficial to decrease interfacial tension if the hydrophobic chains of the surfactant and the oil have similar structure, and phenyl has a positive effect on interfacial efficiency. The results are in agreement with experimental and other theoretical work on surfactants.