Scalable Synthesis of Salt-free Quaternary Ammonium Carboxylate Catanionic Surfactants

Abstract

Surfactants in commercial products commonly contain catanionic mixtures thus many studies of aqueous surfactant mixtures have been carried out. However, hardly any studies have been dedicated to pure catanionic surfactants often termed salt-free catanionic surfactants. One of the difficulties is in acquirement of samples with required purity due to difficult separation of these compounds from inorganic salts. In this work we present an alternative method of synthesis using dimethyl carbonate as the alkylating agent in order to obtain alkyl trimethylammonium alkanecarboxylates with medium alkyl chain lengths (6–10).