The alkyl polyglucoside/fatty alcohol ratio effect on the formation of liquid crystal phases in binary systems

The present research focuses on the alkyl polyglucoside, a non-ionic surfactant, in combination with a fatty alcohol of the same chain length used as a co-surfactant. A series of solutions were prepared, with varying both APG/FA ratio and its concentration in water. Different structures were then obtained, depending on these two parameters: aqueous micellar solutions, normal hexagonal liquid crystalline phase, α-gel phase, as well as the mixture of normal hexagonal/α-gel phases. A specific term “auto-emulsion” was introduced to describe the pseudo emulsions formed by the APG ≤ FA containing solutions because of the fatty alcohol, which dispersion in water was similar to an emulsion representation. The presence of the liquid crystals was revealed by optical microscopy under the polarized light, as different anisotropic conformations corresponding to the lamellar phase, the hexagonal phase and the coexistence of the lamellar and hexagonal phases, mainly for the most concentrated samples, were observed. These structures were characterized at the molecular level through the wide-angle X-ray diffraction technique and their macroscopic behaviour was investigated by rheology tests. Two main observations were then made: the variation of the surfactant concentration in solution promotes the transition between micellar region towards the liquid crystalline formation zone, while the APG/FA ratio impacts the formation of hexagonal phases (APG > FA) or of lamellar ones (APG < FA).