Abstract
When surfactants are adsorbed at interfaces (e.g., gas/liquid, liquid/liquid, or solid/liquid interfaces), a remarkable change in their interfacial properties occurs. In general, however, surfactants are distributed to the interface layer as a surface excess toward bulk concentration, and hence, the effective amount of surfactants to stabilize the interface is significantly decreased from an added amount in the system. In order to control interfacial properties more effectively, surfactants are required to be only present between two phases. From this point of view, we propose a new category of amphiphilic materials to be called “Active Interfacial Modifier (AIM)”. AIM is intrinsically molecularly soluble neither in water nor in organic solvents, but has attractive moieties to each immiscible liquid phase. Hence, AIM practically stays just at the interface to make emulsion stable. In this review, we present physicochemical properties of an emulsion system stabilized by a silicone-type amphiphilic polymer material and future directions of our AIM studies.
