Polar Solvents Trigger Formation of Reverse Micelles

We use molecular dynamics simulations and molecular thermodynamics to investigate the formation of reverse micelles in a system of surfactants and nonpolar solvents. Since the early observation of reverse micelles, the question has been whether the existence of polar solvent molecules such as water is the driving force for the formation of reverse micelles in nonpolar solvents. In this work, we use a simple coarse-grained model of surfactants and solvents to show that a small number of polar solvent molecules triggers the formation of large permanent aggregates. In the absence of polar molecules, both the thermodynamic model and molecular simulations show that small aggregates are more populated in the solution and larger ones are less frequent as the system evolves over time. The size and shape of reverse micelles depend on the size of the polar core: the shape is spherical for a large core and ellipsoidal for a smaller one. Using the coarse-grained model, we also investigate the effect of temperature and surfactant tail length. Our results reveal that the number of surfactant molecules in the micelle decreases as the temperature increases, but the average diameter does not change because the size of the polar core remains invariant. A reverse micelle with small polar core attracts fewer surfactants when the tail is long. The uptake of solvent particles by a micelle of longer surfactant tail is less than shorter ones when the polar solvent particles are initially distributed randomly.