Water contamination is a serious environmental issue with great negative impacts on the health of living organisms. Petroleum films from oil slicks represent one of the major water pollutants. The utilization of bio-based surfactants derived from natural sources/wastes can be an eco-friendly solution to address this problem. In such direction, a new series of palm kernel oil mucilage (PKOM)-based cationic surfactants (4a–e) has been synthesized through an efficient procedure and the structures were characterized spectroscopically. Firstly, the free fatty acids mixture was extracted from PKOM, reduced with LiAlH4 to the corresponding alcohols mixture and esterified with chloroacetic acid to afford fatty chlorides mixture. Parallelly, tertiary amine-tethering various aryl sulfonamides (3a–e) were prepared from the reaction of sulfonyl chlorides with a primary amine-tertiary amine hybrid compound. |
