Hydrophilic-lipophilic balance

HLB value (HLB is short for. Hydrophilic-lipophilic balance ) describes the hydrophilic and lipophilic portion of mainly non -ionic surfactants in the chemical industry and has been proposed by WC Griffin 1954.

Method according to Griffin

HLB value of nonionic surfactants can be calculated as follows:

Where Ml is the molecular weight of the lipophilic portion of a molecule and M is the molar mass of the entire molecule. The factor 20 is a Griffin freely selected scaling factor. This therefore results in a scale of 0 to 20, an HLB value of 1 indicates a lipophilic compound, a chemical compound having an HLB of 20 has a high hydrophilic portion. A value of 3-8 is assigned to W / O emulsifiers, between 8-18 O / W emulsifiers. Detergents have HLB values ​​between 13-15. Phospholipids have a value of 5 and lysophosphatides between 12-16.

Method of Davies

In addition to the method of Griffin, there are other methods for calculating the HLB value. However, these are far less common. Called here is only the method according to Davies, who suggested in 1957 to calculate the HLB number of values ​​for the individual chemical groups of a molecule. Advantage of this method is the higher weighting of strongly interacting groups interacting over less. In addition, as the HLB value of cationic and anionic surfactants can be defined. According to Davies, the HLB value is calculated as:

With: