Sustainability Principal Scientist ExxonMobil, United States
Abstract: ExxonMobil’s innovation in hydrophobe production technology has enabled lightly branched alcohols that offer advantages as surfactants in multiple home care detergent applications.ExxonMobil’s new developmental grade of C13 lightly branched alcohols is currently undergoing scale-up from pilot to early industrial test scale.This developmental alcohol with 1.5 branches/molecule has been used to synthesize surfactant derivatives at the laboratory scale including alcohol ethoxylates (AE), alcohol sulfates (AS), and alcohol ether sulfates (AES).These surfactants have been tested standalone and as components in representative leading formulations in laundry, hard surface cleaning, and hand dish applications.In laundry, direct substitution for incumbent ingredients like natural fatty alcohol-based surfactants resulted in performance with indications of potential advantages in reformulation to enhance cold-water cleaning.In hard surface cleaning, the novel lightly branched alcohol surfactants out-performed the controls across three (3) different representative formulations.Data will be shared for hand dish application testing showing grease removal and suds mileage efficiency.Biodegradation data of the lightly branched alcohol derived surfactants will also be shown.The 1.5 branched alcohol surfactant derivatives are novel products in that there are no commercial offerings today with similar level of branching and performance.The home care application data presented here indicates that these new lightly branched alcohols could enable growth in existing formulations or potential improvements via reformulation to offer an innovative and exciting alternative to existing natural and synthetic (semi)-linear alcohol technologies.
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