REVISITING SURFACTANT-INDUCED EVAPORATION SUPPRESSION THROUGH QUANTITATIVE REANALYSIS OF REVERSED-FLOW GAS CHROMATOGRAPHY DATA

Khalisanni KHALID; Mohammad Hafiz Bin HAMZAH

doi:10.24193/subbchem.2026.3.05

Authors

Khalisanni KHALID Malaysian Agricultural Research and Development Institute (MARDI), Persiaran MARDI-UPM, 43400 Serdang, Selangor, Malaysia. *Corresponding author: typhloids@gmail.com https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9647-2322
Mohammad Hafiz Bin HAMZAH Prime Minister’s Department, Implementation Coordination Unit, Perdana Putra Building, Federal Government Administration Centre, 62000 Putrajaya, Malaysia

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.24193/subbchem.2026.3.05

Keywords:

alcohol-water, RF-GC, surfactant

Abstract

Surfactant-induced evaporation suppression has traditionally been interpreted in terms of increasing monolayer surface coverage. However, the physical significance of this interpretation at concentrations exceeding nominal monolayer coverage remains uncertain. In this study, the complete reversed-flow gas chromatography (RF-GC) dataset originally reported by Mohammad et al. (2013) was systematically reanalysed using an updated physicochemical framework and revised surface-coverage calculations. The quantitative reanalysis demonstrates that evaporation suppression increases progressively with surfactant concentration and extends well beyond the nominal monolayer condition. This behaviour cannot be explained solely by geometric surface coverage, particularly near the critical micelle concentration (CMC), where interfacial saturation would be expected. Instead, the observed trends are more consistent with concentration-dependent changes in interfacial transport behaviour rather than monolayer formation alone. By integrating the original RF-GC measurements with a revised theoretical interpretation, this work provides a more physically consistent framework for understanding surfactant-mediated evaporation suppression while clarifying the limitations of describing evaporation resistance exclusively in terms of monolayer coverage.

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