PARTIAL BLOCKING OF ION-TRANSPORT AT THE INTERFACE OF AN ION-SELECTIVE LIQUID MEMBRANE-ELECTRODE BY NEUTRAL SURFACTANTS - EXPERIMENTS AND COMPUTER-SIMULATION

Lipophilic neutral surfactants of the sugar alkyl ester type are exper imentally observed to substantially increase the ion transfer impedanc e between an aqueous solution and ion-selective electrode membranes ma de from plasticized PVC with neutral carrier. The magnitude of the eff ect depends considerably on the molecular structure and on the concent ration of the surfactant. Statistical thermodynamic simulation of the experimental system agrees qualitatively with the experimental observa tions. (C) 1998 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved .