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December 2006 |
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| Measuring Surface Tension with DROPimage Advanced | |||||
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There are several methods that can be used
to measure surface tension. Years ago ramé-hart manufactured a
tensiometer which used the Wilhelmy plate method. This method, in its
day, was useful but it relied on the precise measurement of force exerted
by a surface on a solid. Another traditional method is the Du Noüy Ring
method. This requires the measurement of the maximum force required to
pull a ring from a surface. The wetting properties of the solid
interface have little impact on the resulting measurement. At ramé-hart
we have found significant challenges producing hardware that can be used
to gather meaningful data with these legacy methods. Additionally these
methods are very time consuming and have extensive setup and procedures.
Thus we are currently focused solely on the Pendant drop method using
drop shape analysis. Our
DROPimage Advanced software supports both surface tension as well as
interfacial tension studies using this method.
In the video below, we measure the surface tension of Decalin in air. The solid interface is teflon (the needle of the dispensing system). Ten measurements are taken with two seconds delay between measurements. This shows how fast and easy it is to collect valuable surface tension data, with minimal setup time, using ramé-hart Model 500 Goniometer with DROPimage Advanced v2.0. If you have any problem launching this video from within your email, click here to watch: Watch Video.
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