Amphoteric phosphocholine as a family of mild surfactants are widely used in biology due to their phosphate structure related to naturally occurring membrane lipids. Changing its hydrophobic part to the fluorocarbon counterparts, it was found that the interfacial properties of phosphocholine surfactants exhibit significant differences. Currently, the research on fluorinated phosphocholine surfactants is limited and lacks types of fluorinated hydrophobic structures. We found that oxygen atoms exhibit specificity in fluorinated surfactants in our previous works. In this work, a kind of phosphocholine containing a fluoroether hydrophobic chain was synthesized, and its interfacial properties, foam properties, and wetting properties were studied. At the beginning, we conducted a substitution reaction using fluoroether alcohols and 2-chloro-2-oxo-1,3,2-dioxaphospholane as raw materials, triethylamine as a base, and tetrahydrofuran (THF) as a solvent under ice bath. Then, the intermediate C72-P is obtained through distillation, which is a transparent viscous liquid with a yield of 70%. The next step is to dissolve the C72-P with trimethylamine (2 mol/L in THF) in acetonitrile at 70 ℃ for 48 h. Finally, a fluoroether phosphocholine surfactant was obtained and purified through column chromatography to give C72-MPB in 90% yield. Under the same conditions, a fluorinated linear phosphocholine surfactant 6:2-MPB was prepared using perfluorohexyl ethanol, which is a white solid with a overall yield of 60%. The phosphocholine fluorinated surfactants C72-MPB and 6:2-MPB were diluted with distilled water to obtain various concentrations of solutions, the surface properties were measured by surface tension instrument Krüss K100C, and the surface tension was measured by Wilhelmy platinum plate method. On the other hand, the performance of foam under two different concentrations of C72-MPB was tested by bubbling method, and the morphology of foam was observed. C72-MPB solution was dropped onto the surface of polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE), contact angle on PTFE was measured, and its wettability at different time was recorded. The results show that the new fluoroether phosphocholine surfactant has good solubility, low surface tension, good wettability, good foam stability. Fluoroether phosphocholine surfactants have potential utility value in the field of life sciences and medicine. It is a kind of surfactant with excellent application prospects.

Key words: fluoroether surfactants, phosphocholine, surface tension, critical micelle concentration, foam, contact angle