Anionic surfactants are synthetic chemicals that lower the surface tension of liquids, making them effective cleaners in water. They are used in a variety of products such as shampoos, toothpastes, and fire extinguishers. Nonionic surfactants are less aggressive and suitable for household cleaners. Biosurfactants are used in oil spill cleanup.
An anionic surfactant is a macromolecule, usually in the sulfonate or sulfate group of chemicals such as sodium laureth sulfate, that acts as a surface active agent to lower the surface tension of liquids. This allows them to bind to impurities and particles suspended in the liquid, which makes them effective cleaners in water. In small concentrations, they can also cause compounds in water to foam by creating large numbers of small gas bubbles, making them effective in cosmetics such as shampoos, toothpastes, and fire extinguishers.
The basic soap used to clean the human body is also a type of surfactant or detergent based on natural fatty acids of plant or animal origin. The difference with an anionic surfactant is that it is largely a synthetic chemical and has been designed to act not only as a surfactant that binds to oils and particles in water, but also as a denaturing chemical for proteins. Because anionic surfactants break down proteins attached to clothes in water, they are not recommended for ordinary soap use, since human skin is also a type of protein.
Chemical engineering has perfected anionic surfactant synthetic detergents since the late 1940s, when they began to replace ordinary soap for use in washing machines. The negative electrical charge of their ionic nature causes them to bind to dissolved minerals in hard water. Regular soap will leave an insoluble gray film on materials that are washed in hard water. The first surfactant detergents were based on alkylated compounds, and the drawback of their use was that they were led into natural streams in city wastewater systems, where their foaming ability prevents degradation by natural microorganisms . These compounds were made illegal in 1965 in most nations and the switch to alkylbenzene sulfonate (LAS) related chemicals has alleviated some of the problems with water pollution.
LAS surfactants now have a wide variety of uses. They are essential for the emulsion polymerization of various plastics, such as polystyrene, are used to protect agricultural seeds from mold and mildew, and are included in a wide variety of emulsion paints. Industrial cleaning products also depend on LAS compounds, with approximately 50% of all LAS production going to household cleaning products.
Nonionic surfactants are less aggressive than their counterparts and have some similarities to regular soap, making them suitable for widespread use in dishwashing liquids and other household cleaners where contact with human skin is frequent. They are more effective in breaking down the fat residues produced during cooking. This is because they are related to fat molecules and are derived from fatty alcohols produced from ethylene, paraffin and so on. Compounds have both petroleum-based and natural sources. About 5% of all world oil production since 2003 went to the production of fatty alcohol nonionic surfactants, equal to 212,000,000 tons of the compound produced globally.
Special types of anionic surfactant compounds known as biosurfactants are also used in oil spill cleanup. They are derived from natural compounds and have oleophilic molecular ends for scavenging oil and hydrophilic ends for bonding with water molecules. As a typical anionic surfactant, they reduce the surface tension in water to break large oil droplets into smaller droplets which can then disperse and biodegrade naturally. Biosurfactants allow oil cleanup operations to either pipe polluted water directly to wastewater treatment plants, or break up the oil spill enough for the natural bacteria in the water to further degrade the dispersed oil droplets.
Protect your devices with Threat Protection by NordVPN
