The players in the marketplace are constantly changing and so is Aqua Bond with a new direction and purpose as we transform into a Speciality Chemicals Manufacturer to pursue social, economic, and environmental (SEE) selective surfactants to market in the Household, Industrial, and Institutional (HI&I) cleaners, personal care toiletries/products, and cosmetic marketplace. Mergers and acquistions of the larger players see constant price increases to the customer base to pay for these monopolistic entities. The time is ripe to service the customer base with more competitive pricing, better service, and more options.
SURFACTANTS
A surfactant is a compound that lowers surface tension of a liquid, increasing the contact between the liquid and another substance. Surfactant detergents when added to a liquid reduces its surface tension, thereby increasing its spreading and wetting properties. Surfactants have often been referred to as surface active agents. Surfactants have both a hydrophobic and hydrophillic moieties in the molecules, which in combination yield many different properties; wetting agents, low or high foamers, defoamers, low or high detergency, viscosity builders, degreasers, dispersants, coupling agents, emulsifiers, demulsifiers, cross-linkers, solubliziers, suspenders, stabiliziers, and hydrotropes.
Surfactants form aggregates, such as micelles, where the hydrophobic tails form the core of the aggregate and the hydrophilic heads are in contact with the surrounding liquid. The shape of the aggregates depends on the chemical structure of the surfactants, namely the balance in size between the hydrophilic head and hydrophobic tail. A measure of this is the HLB, Hydrophilic-lipophilic balance. Surfactants reduce the surface tension of water by adsorbing at the liquid-air interface. The relation that links the surface tension and the surface excess is known as the Gibbs isotherm. These characteristics result in 4 different surfactant types: anionic, cationic, nonionic, and amphoteric, in which we provide surfactants available in each category.
