Novel Structural Increments for Estimating the Krafft Temperature of Ionic Surfactants in Aqueous Solutions

In this work, we report results of our investigation on the relationship between the Krafft temperature of ionic surfactants in aqueous solutions and their chemical structure. We tested empirical values of the Krafft temperature available in literature for aqueous solutions of 234 ionic surfactants and correlated them to the surfactant chemical structure. In this work, we propose a novel set of 67 group contributions for calculation of the Krafft temperature of ionic surfactants in aqueous solutions. Using them, the Krafft temperature values in aqueous solutions for 174 anionic, 43 cationic, and 17 zwitterionic surfactants were calculated and the estimated values obtained in this way were compared with experimental values. We have demonstrated that the newly developed set of numerical values structural group contributions of the surfactants allows correct estimation of the Krafft temperature value for the tested set of data with the maximum error 7.6°C and the mean square error 3.7°C for various types of ionic surfactants in aqueous solutions.