Oleochemicals are chemicals derived from natural animal and vegetable oils through processes such as hydrolysis, fractionation, transesterification, and hydrogenation, including fatty acids, fatty alcohols, and glycerol. They serve not only as essential starting materials for producing surfactants (for example, fatty alcohols react with ethylene oxide to form AEO series of nonionic surfactants), which themselves are also important formulation components.
The training session will delve into the application of surfactants through extensive cross-industry case studies.
- Daily Chemical Industry: This is the most traditional application area for surfactants. For example, in laundry detergents, anionic surfactants (such as LAS, AES) provide the main detergency, nonionic surfactants (such as AEO-9) enhance the emulsifying ability for polar oil stains such as sebum. In shampoos, amphoteric surfactants (such as betaine) are compounded with the primary surfactant to reduce irritation, thicken, and stabilize the foam.
- Food Industry: Sucrose fatty acid ester, as a safe non-ionic surfactant, is used as an emulsifier and dispersant. It is widely applied in ice cream, chocolate, and margarine to improve texture and stability.
- Petroleum Industry: Biosurfactants (such as rhamnolipids) and chemical surfactants are used in tertiary oil recovery to reduce the interfacial tension between oil and water, thereby extracting residual crude oil trapped in rock pores that is difficult to recover, "driving away" the oil, significantly enhancing crude oil recovery rates.
- Materials and Coatings: Surfactants are used as emulsifiers in emulsion polymerization to prepare acrylates and styrene-polymer emulsions such as polybutadiene, which are used in coatings, adhesives, and other fields.
- Textile Industry: In every stage of spinning, weaving, printing and dyeing, and finishing, surfactants serve as wetting agents, penetrants, refining agents, and softeners, ensuring smooth processes and imparting excellent properties to the fabric.
Through such systematic communication, practitioners can gain a deep understanding of how to reverse-engineer and design the most suitable oleochemicals and surfactant formulations, as well as application processes, based on the performance requirements of downstream products.