Interactions and Solubilization of Disperse Dye with Modified Gemini Surfactants: Investigation Using the Taguchi Method

摘要

Since the interaction of a disperse dye with a surfactant in micelles plays an important role in textile industry, the purpose of this study was to find out the optimal conditions that describe the dye–surfactant interaction. The effects of temperature, gemini surfactant concentration and ethylene-oxide chain length of gemini surfactants were investigated and optimized using the Taguchi method. First, this method was adopted to carry out the parameter design, and the interaction parameters that would affect the absorbance of UV–visible spectrum were chosen as the control factors. After the selection of an appropriate orthogonal array, an analysis of variance was applied to decide upon the optimal conditions of solubilization parameters and determine the significant factors of the UV–visible absorbance. The optimized conditions were as follow: surfactant concentration 5.6 × 10−4 M, length of ethylene oxide chain 20, and temperature 40 °C. Finally, the experimental results of confirmation tests with a confidence interval of 95%, indicated that the experiment is reliable and reproducible. Under these optimum conditions, it was also determined that the solubilization of disperse dye using modified gemini surfactants increased when the surfactant concentration and the ethylene oxide chain length increased.