With a powerful X-ray beam technique, researchers explore what makes soft materials such as toothpaste and hair gel relax. The insights they’ve gained can aid in the design of new consumer products and nanotechnologies.
October 11, 2022
With a powerful X-ray beam technique, researchers explore what makes soft materials such as toothpaste and hair gel relax. The insights they’ve gained can aid in the design of new consumer products and nanotechnologies.
Shaving gel, shampoo and a cup of yogurt. What do they all have in common? They’re all examples of soft materials, meaning materials that easily change shape when stress is applied.
In day-to-day life, soft materials are everywhere. Toothpaste, skin creams, tissues and coatings are just a few examples. Under stress, soft materials are able to change shape due to the tiny fluctuation of their particles, which are dynamic. This process of «relaxation» occurs randomly and at too small of a scale for scientists to easily pin down. But with the help of the Advanced Photon Source (APS), a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science user facility located at DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory, researchers are gaining a better understanding of these materials.
In a pair of recently published papers, two independent research teams successfully used a powerful X-ray beam technique at the APS to uncover new insights about the dynamics of soft materials. The information they learned can potentially aid in the design and development of a wide range of consumer products, including food products such as ice cream and gelatin desserts; personal care items such as moisturizers and shampoo; batteries; paints, foams and plastics used in manufacturing; and even nanotechnologies that make up coatings and systems for drug delivery.
«Understanding the dynamics of soft materials is important because we believe they have a direct and profound impact on properties we would want to control, such as viscosity and elasticity. Those properties control things like how soft a gel is or how fast a material flows,» said Argonne assistant physicist Qingteng Zhang, a co-author on both papers.
