Can More Nanoparticles Induce Larger Viscosities of Nanoparticle-Enhanced Wormlike Micellar System (NEWMS)?

There have been many reports about the thickening ability of nanoparticles on the wormlike micelles in the recent years. Through the addition of nanoparticles, the viscosity of wormlike micelles can be increased. There still exists a doubt: can viscosity be increased further by adding more nanoparticles? To answer this issue, in this work, the effects of silica nanoparticles and temperature on the nanoparticles-enhanced wormlike micellar system (NEWMS) were studied. The typical wormlike micelles (wormlike micelles) are prepared by 50 mM cetyltrimethyl ammonium bromide (CTAB) and 60 mM sodium salicylate (NaSal). The rheological results show the increase of viscoelasticity in NEWMS by adding nanoparticles, with the increase of zero-shear viscosity and relaxation time. However, with the further increase of nanoparticles, an interesting phenomenon appears. The zero-shear viscosity and relaxation time reach the maximum and begin to decrease. The results show a slight increasing trend for the contour length of wormlike micelles by adding nanoparticles, while no obvious effect on the entanglement and mesh size. In addition, with the increase of temperature, remarkable reduction of contour length and relaxation time can be observed from the calculation. NEWMS constantly retain better viscoelasticity compared with conventional wormlike micelles without silica nanoparticles. According to the Arrhenius equation, the activation energy E(a) shows the same increase trend of NEWMS. Finally, a mechanism is proposed to explain this interesting phenomenon.