Novel Polysaccharide-Based Surfactants for Sustainable Product Formulations

Project Description

Sugar-based surfactants have gained traction as sustainable alternatives to conventional surfactants in personal care and cleaning applications. They offer many excellent performance properties while being bio-sourced, gentle on human skin, and biodegradable. Under certain conditions, however, these sugar-based surfactants can encounter solubility or foaming issues which make them undesirable for some applications. It is hypothesized and generally accepted that a surfactant containing an increased number of sugar units will address these solubility and foaming concerns, but existing synthetic procedures are not well-equipped to create such molecules at scale. We have devised a convenient and high-throughput synthesis towards these larger sugar-based surfactants and now seek to understand their fundamental behavior and develop their properties for applications in sustainable product formulations.

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