The American Cleaning Institute, formerly known as The Soap and Detergent Association, has recognized the Iranian and Swedish researchers, who have discovered a class of surfactants that prevent the formation of corrosion on steel surfaces.
The organization honors the paper titled, “Comparison of a Cationic Gemini Surfactant and the Corresponding Monomeric Surfactant for Corrosion Protection of Mild Steel in Hydrochloric Acid.” The paper was published in the Journal of Surfactants and Detergents in 2011 and the award was offered at the 103rd annual meeting of the American Oil Chemists’ Society (AOCS).
An assistant professor at Sahand University’s Polymer Engineering Department, Dr. Mohammad Mahdavian, noted that acid cleaning is a significantly used method to remove mill scale, rust and impurities from mild steel surfaces. Still, the strong corrosivity property of acid cleaning formulations can lead to material loss and corrosion. Hence, corrosion inhibitors are frequently used in these formulations.
Dr. Mahdavian and his team, including Dr. Ali Reza Tehrani-Bagha and Dr. Krister Holmberg, a professor of applied surface chemistry at Chalmers University of Technology in Göteborg, Sweden, worked on two different cationic surfactants, a monomeric surfactant(12-4-12) and adimeric surfactant (DTAB). They compared the corrosion inhibition property of both these materials and found that the monomeric surfactant revealed a very high corrosion inhibition efficiency at extremely low concentrations than the dimeric surfactant. The surface tension studies have shown that the high efficiency is associated to higher charge density and surface activity of the 12-4-12 surfactant. The research results can assist the developers of acid cleaning solutions in choosing an ideal surfactant and also help to create a new generation of surfactant materials with higher performance.
Source: http://www.cleaninginstitute.org/