Thermal diffusion of oligosaccharide solutions: the role of chain length and structure.

We investigated the chain length dependence of the thermodiffusion behavior of oligosaccharides by the infrared thermal diffusion forced Rayleigh scattering (IR-TDFRS) technique. Three disaccharides, sucrose, cellobiose and maltose, two trisaccharides, melezitose and raffinose, and a tetrasaccharide, stachyose, have been studied. We determined the thermal diffusion (D(T)), mass diffusion (D), and Soret (S(T)) coefficient as a function of temperature and concentration. While monosaccharides in water accumulate at the cold side in the investigated temperature (20-50 degrees C) and concentration (0.2-0.6667 wt) range, oligosaccharides enrich on the warm side with decreasing temperature or increasing sugar concentration. Additionally, we determined the kinematic viscosity (nu), the density (rho), and the thermal expansion coefficient (alpha) of the mixtures in order to check the linear correlation between D(T) and the ratio alpha/nu, which has been recently found for aqueous solutions of monosaccharides and for alkane mixtures. Finally, we found that D(T) and D decay with increasing chain length of the oligosaccharides in the whole studied range of temperatures, in contradiction with experimental results for nonpolar mixtures and theoretical predictions.