Designing and Testing the Streaming Potential for the Adsorption of Surfactants

The adsorption of surfactants is very similar to that of vesicles to form lipid bilayers. Therefore, they can serve as models for replicating vesicle adsorption. Lipid bilayers have received great attention due to their application in biosensors, semiconductors, and many other applications as they provide biological fictionalization to inorganic materials. In this re se a r ch, the goal is to replicate and test a scaled down version of a streaming potential apparatus to suite the needs of surfactant adsorptions and to prove the theory works under smaller scale conditions. The purpose of this apparatus is to indicate when a substrate is completely adsorbed. In fact, one of the most efficient techniques of measuring adsorption is by using a streaming potential. A receding goal is to experimentally determine the factors that optimize the adsorption of surfactants into a silica surface by changing the concentration of surfactant along with finding the correlation between the zeta potential or surface charge of the substrate and the concentration of the aqueous solution in which the surfactant will be suspended in. Thus far, the streaming potential is being tested under different conditions such as temperature, concentration and stability for consistency.