A New Methodology in Quantifying Surfactant Interactions

This study rapidly quantifies binary and ternary surfactant interactions in the context of formulation development. This work utilizes model-driven design of experiments paired with ML-based approaches to determine the critical micelle concentration (CMC) of surfactant mixtures in one 96 well plate and one week. The high-throughput, novel methodology efficiently and accurately reproduced the literature-reported mixture CMC for the Sodium Dodecyl Sulfate (SDS) and Tetraethylene Glycol Monooctyl Ether (C8E4) as well as the mixture CMC for SDS / C8E4 in 0.5 M NaCl. Additionally, this methodology determined that Non-ideal Solution Theory (developed by Hua and Rosen) fails to adequately model ternary mixtures. Current work is related to expanding this high-throughput approach to ternary surfactant models and looking at the cosolvent and cosurfactant effects of hexanol.