CR team members Tobias Halthur and Jonas Carlstedt are the authors of a review just published in COCIS on the compatibility between polymers and surfactants.
In all formulated products (personal care, pharmaceutics, laundry detergents, foods…) it is crucial to understand how molecules of the polymer type and the surfactant type interact with each other: in particular if they are miscible with each other or if they separate out. the latter sounds like it should be a bad thing but it might actually be what you want…. Anyway, as always, key to control is understanding!
Systems like these have been studied a lot but not as much with the new green materials in mind. Thus, the CR team wanted to see if based on the fundamentals known through old work, deductions could be made to fast forward the understanding of new and more bio-friendly systems.
The review was written on invitation based on a lecture given by Tobias Halthur at the Science based Formulation course given in Pescara (2023) and Florence (2024) together with many great professors and scientists from academia and industry.
Polymer – surfactant interactions and compatibility for ionic surfactants combined with hydrophilic polymers: Stability and miscibility vs. segregative or associative phase separation and deposition. Current Opinion in Colloid & Interface Science, 76, 101894 2025
