Instrument for measurement of interfacial structure-property relationships with decoupled interfacial shear and dilatational flow: "Quadrotrough".

Understanding the interfacial structure-property relationship of complex fluid-fluid interfaces is increasingly important for guiding the formulation of systems with targeted interfacial properties, such as those found in multiphase complex fluids, biological systems, biopharmaceuticals formulations, and many consumer products. Mixed interfacial flow fields, typical of classical Langmuir trough experiments, introduce a complex interfacial flow history that complicates the study of interfacial properties of complex fluid interfaces. In this article, we describe the design, implementation, and validation of a new instrument capable of independent application of controlled interfacial dilation and shear kinematics on fluid interfaces.

Competitive Surface Activity of Monoclonal Antibodies and Nonionic Surfactants at the Air-Water Interface Determined by Interfacial Rheology and Neutron Reflectometry.

Interfacial stresses can destabilize therapeutic formulations containing monoclonal antibodies (mAbs), which is proposed to be a result of adsorption and aggregation at the air-water interface. To increase protein stability, pharmaceutical industries add surfactants, such as Polysorbate 20 (PS20), into protein formulations to minimize mAb adsorption at the interface but rarely quantify this process. We determine that mAb adsorption in surfactant-free solutions creates a monolayer with significant viscoelasticity, which can influence measurements of bulk mAb solution viscosity.

Characterizing the Interface Scaling of High Block Copolymers near the Order-Disorder Transition.

Advancements in the directed self-assembly of block copolymers (BCPs) have prompted the development of new materials with larger effective interaction parameters (). This enables BCP systems with phase separation at increasingly small degrees of polymerization (). Very often these systems reside near the order-disorder transition and fit between the weak and strong segregation limits where the behavior of BCP systems is not as thoroughly understood.

Quantifying the Interface Energy of Block Copolymer Top Coats.

Block copolymers (BCPs) have the potential to play a key role in templating materials for nanoscale synthesis. BCP lithography likely will be one of the first examples of BCP-based nanomanufacturing implemented in a production setting. One of the challenges in implementing BCP lithography is that the lamella need to be oriented perpendicular to the substrate.