Surfactant Surface-Patterned Starch Particles for Adsorption-Based Applications: The Role of Sabatier’s Principle

This study reports on the structural characterization and physicochemical properties of surface modified starch particles (SPs). The surface of the SPs were patterned via controlled deposition of cetylpyridinium bromide (CPB) at the solid-solution interface with incremental CPB loadings, denoted as SP-CPBX, where X = 0.5, 2.5, or 5.0 mM CPB. The surface patterned SPs were characterized by several complementary methods: spectroscopic (NMR, FT-IR, Raman, and SEM), thermoanalyt-ical (DSC, TGA), powder X-ray diffraction (PXRD), gravimetric-based solvent swelling, zeta-potential () and particle size distribution (PSD). NMR spectral results reveal that CPB is bound at the starch-solvent interface via the pyridyl head group, whereas the tertiary structure of the SPs was maintained over the range of CPB doping, as revealed by SEM and PXRD re-sults. The -value results of the SP-CPBX systems reveal negative -values at the starch surface, where tunable surface properties occur at variable levels of CPB surface pa...