I hope this is helpful for you, if you have any questions on any of the methods covered in the video, or you’d like some training or advice then don’t hesitate to get in touch
Video Transcript Welcome to Rheology Lab:
Hi I’m Neil Cunningham, welcome to the rheology lab!
We measure the physical properties of soft materials, so by soft materials I mean liquids and semi solids, most specifically I’m talking about suspensions, emulsions, gels, polymer, solutions, surfactants, solutions, waxes, pastes, slurries and that kind of thing.
So what are we actually measuring here in the lab well let’s start with rheology and starting point with rheology is viscosity. Viscosity is a function of shear rate shear stress temperature then moving on to structure of emulsions and suspensions. There we can look at the rigidity and the strength what your modulus and yield stress of that structure and thixotropy either breakdown and recovery behaviour of that structure.
And then for polymers solutions and surfactants, what we call elastic liquids then we can measure storage and loss modulus G Prime and G double prime, tan Delta crossover frequencies relaxation times a normal stress generation. Then everything I’ve just talked about in three dimensions we’re measuring the bolt rheology we can also measure in two dimensions at a surface or an interface using inter facial rheology techniques.
And then for understanding wettability we can look at contact angle surface tension in interfacial tension surface free energy and dynamic wetting processes, and then this tribology, tribology is the measure of the friction and lubrication of interacting surfaces and specifically here we’re looking at bio tribology or soft tribology, where we’re predicting the friction and lubrication of biological services so that could be a food product in the mouth, a topical product in a skin on skin interaction or an eye dropped on the surface of the eye.
We’re going to be uploading a whole bunch of videos explaining the applications and the terminology and the concepts behind these techniques so if you’re interested please subscribe and we’ll let you know when new videos are uploaded, and we’re pretty approachable bunch here really so if you have any questions relating to what we’re talking about here then please contact me on my team and we’d love to work with you thank you!
Contact us for a tour and a chat, or send us your samples for testing
Or watch our Welcome to Rheology Lab video!
