Diffusion of water in multilamellar vesicles of dialkyl and dialkyl ester ammonium surfactants

The NMR self-diffusion technique is used for measuring diffusion of water in highly concentrated multilamellar vesicle solutions. The signal intensity of water, i.e. the water echo-decay, is monitored down to very small intensities thus providing an accurate measure of how water is diffusing in the solution. It is noted that a large curvature is dominating the functional form of the echo-decay indicating the presence of a large number of multilamellar vesicles. It is also concluded that in order to measure accurately the volume fraction of water inside and outside vesicles the experimental time scale can be changed. From a multiexponential fit to the echo-decay the fraction fast and the sum of all slow components can be extracted. When the apparent fraction “vesicle water”, Pvwapp, is plotted versus the experimental time scale the graph produced is a good representation of the difference in how fast water diffuses over the different vesicle membranes. From an extrapolation to “zero time” the true fraction of trapped water can be extracted, i.e. a quantitative measure of the volume fraction of vesicles at a certain concentration of surfactant.