Abstract:

Polymer surfactant has recently received a lot of attention because it is a kind of substances with both high molecular weight and high surface activity and has great prospect in oil recovery, paint industry, bionics filming and so on. This paper reviews their development and status quo about recent years, including modified natural substance polymer surfactants and synthesized polymer surfactants. The modification of cellulose is grafting the hydrophobic groups onto cellulose to improve its surface activity. Up to now, the method of ultrasonic irradiation is an efficient way. There are large amount of species of synthesized surfactants. The main synthesized methods are homopolymerization of amphiphilic monomers, copolymerization of hydrophilic and hydrophobic monomer and grafting the amphiphilic monomer onto high molecular. It is shown that some advances in synthesizing high molecular weight and high surface activity polymer surfactants are made in the last more than five years. But at present, there is no polymer surfactant that has both a super high molecular weight and high surface activity. A lot of works need to be done about the polymer surfactants.

Key words: polymer surfactant, surface activity, viscosification property