Strong Acid-Nonionic Surfactant Lyotropic Liquid-Crystalline Mesophases as Media for the Synthesis of Carbon Quant
By Olutaş, Elif B.; Balcı, Fadime M. & Dag, Omer
Published in Langmuir
2015
Abstract
Lyotropic liquid-crystalline (LLC) materials are important in designing porous materials, and acids are as important in chemical synthesis. Combining these two important concepts will be highly beneficial to chemistry and material science. In this work, we show that a strong acid can be used as a solvent for the assembly of nonionic surfactants into various mesophases. Sulfuric acid (SA), 10-lauryl ether (C12E10), and a small amount of water form bicontinuous cubic (V1), 2D-hexagonal (H1), and micelle cubic (I1) mesophases with increasing SA/C12E10 mole ratio. A mixture of SA and C12E10 is fluidic but transforms to a highly ordered LLC mesophase by absorbing ambient water. The LLC mesophase displays high proton conductivity (1.5 to 19.0 mS/cm at room temperature) that increases with an increasing SA content up to 11 SA/C12E10 mole ratio, where the absorbed water is constant with respect to the SA amount but gradually increases from a 2.3 to 4.3 H?O/C12E10 mole ratio with increasing SA/C12E10 from 2 to 11, respectively. The mixture of SA and C12E10 slowly undergoes carbonization to produce carbon quant