Ever wondered how to measure the surface tension of small droplets?
A new BML collaborative work by the Allain, Barral and Dufresne Laboratories explains how.
Researchers in the Allain, Barral and Dufresne Laboratories at ETH Zurich teamed up to scale down the classical sessile droplet method for measuring the surface tension of liquids. The method has been successfully applied to meausre the interfacial tension between coexisting phases of polymers and proteins phase separated droplets. Since the sample volume is a great concern in these systems, this novel method hold great promise as it only uses microliters of material.
The work has been published in Soft Matter:
Mahdiye Ijavi, Robert W. Style, Leonidas Emmanouilidis, Anil Kumar, Sandro M. Meier, Alexandre L. Torzynski, Frédéric H. T. Allain, Yves Barral, Michel O. Steinmetz and Eric R. Dufresne. Surface tensiometry of phase separated protein and polymer droplets by the sessile drop method. Soft Matter (2021) 17, 1655-1662. external pageDOI:10.1039/D0SM01319F