Home

 

Essential Instrumental Methods for
Colloid, Interface and Complex Fluid Characterization

The short course was held in January 2002 and again in 2005. Fourteen students, representing eight companies, have participated in the course. Information about the course and the course schedule are provided below. The short course will be held again at CMU - to be contacted about future short courses, please contact Dr. Annette Jacobson (contact information below).

This course is right for you if

  • You formulate materials based on colloidal suspensions, emulsions, multiphase fluids, surfactant or polymer solutions.
  • You develop or run manufacturing processes involving such complex fluids.
  • Your product manufacturing processes or applications involve coatings.
  • You are responsible for solid/liquid separation or crystallization processes.

This course presents hands-on practical experience in parallel with the theory that allows you to understand what problems can be solved with each technique, how to properly interpret data, and how to avoid common errors for:

  • Particle Size Measurements
  • Particle Charge Measurements
  • Specific Surface Area of Powders
  • Surface Tension and Surfactancy
  • Surface Analysis by Atomic Force Microscopy
  • Optical Methods of Surface and Thin Film Characterization
  • Rotational Rheometry of Complex Fluids
  • Contact Angle and Wettability

About the Course

  • Light Scattering for Particle Size
  • Electrokinetics for Particle Charge
  • BET for Particulate Surface Area
  • Rotational Rheometry
  • Atomic Force Microscopy for Surface Analysis
  • Surface Tension and Surfactancy
  • Optical Methods of Surface and Thin Film Characterization
  • Contact Angle and Wettability

The Center for Complex Fluids Engineering conducts fundamental research into continuum and molecular level processes that govern the behaviors of complex solutions, particulate suspensions and interfaces. In the course of their research, CCFE faculty have employed - and developed - a wide variety of experimental characterization tools and they have educated many students in their proper usage. The educational arm of the CCFE, the Colloids, Polymers and Surfaces Program, has over a 25 year history of educating undergraduate and graduate students in the science and technology of complex fluids, suspensions, and interfaces.

Targeting industrial scientists and engineers with a B.S. or higher degree, this course introduces the most important characterization techniques, with a practical emphasis on commercially available instrumentation or non-commercial techniques that could be readily implemented and maintained in an industrial R&D setting.

Course Format

Each technique is presented in the context of the types of problems that it can help to solve. Theory is presented at the level that one needs in order to understand exactly what is being measured, proper data interpretation, and the limiting assumptions that must be appreciated in order to avoid common pitfalls of inappropriate application or misinterpretation of data.

Each participant attends the lectures for every technique the course covers, and also chooses three techniques for active, hands-on laboratory experiences.

Course Faculty

Annette M. Jacobson, Director of the Colloids, Polymers and Surfaces Program and Principal Lecturer in Chemical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon, obtained her doctorate in chemical engineering from Carnegie Mellon. She joined the Carnegie Mellon faculty in 1988 after six years of industrial experience with PPG Industries where she was a senior research engineer in product development at the PPG Glass Research and Technology Center. Her interests include surfactant micellization and solubilization and the characterization of complex fluids.

Anastasia Morfesis is an Adjunct Researcher in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon and is Manager of Applications for Dispersion Technology Systems at Malvern Instruments, Inc. Her areas of responsibility for Malvern Instruments include dynamic light scattering, zeta potential and acoustic spectroscopy. She joined Malvern Instruments two years ago after twelve years of experience at PPG Industries, where she developed new products and established a Colloid & Surface Science Laboratory which she supervised. She obtained her M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts. Her research interests include particle sizing, emulsion stability, interfacial phenomena, coatings, wetting, spreading, and coalescence of films. In 1996 she was Chair of the Colloid and Surface Chemistry Division of the American Chemical Society.

Gary D. Patterson, Professor of Chemical Physics and Polymer Science at Carnegie Mellon, obtained his Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from Stanford University in 1972.
He was a member of technical staff in the Chemical Physics Department at AT&T Bell Laboratories from 1972-1984 and joined the Department of Chemistry at Carnegie Mellon in 1984. His research interests include the structure and dynamics of amorphous materials, light scattering spectroscopy, polymer science, colloid science and the physics of liquids. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the Royal Society of Chemistry and received the National Academy of Sciences Award for Initiatives in Research in 1981.

Dennis C. Prieve is the Gulf Professor of Chemical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon. He obtained his B.S. in chemical engineering at the University of Florida in 1970 and his Ph.D. from the University of Delaware in 1974. His research concerns the nature and measurement of colloidal forces, as well as electrokinetic phenomena, flocculation, and the capture of particles from flowing streams. In 1995 he received the Alpha Chi Sigma Award, which is awarded annually by the American Inst. of Chemical Engineers for chemical engineering research. He has been co-editor of Colloids and Surfaces A since 1999 and is currently the Chair of the Gordon Research Conference on Chemistry at Interfaces.

James W. Schneider, Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon, obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1998. He joined Carnegie Mellon in 1999 after a year-long postdoc at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC. His interests include the development of biomolecular materials for separations and sensing, along with intermolecular forces in biological systems. He was a 2001 recipient of a Career Award from the National Science Foundation.

Robert D. Tilton, Professor of Chemical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon, earned his Ph.D. in 1991 at Stanford University. He joined Carnegie Mellon after a one year postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Surface Chemistry and the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. His research interests include polymer/surfactant complexation, solubilization, adsorption from multicomponent fluid mixtures, as well as adsorption, binding, and electrokinetic phenomena in biotechnological systems. He was the 1993 recipient of the American Chemical Society Victor K. La Mer Award for Graduate Research in Colloid and Surface Chemistry, a 1992 recipient of a DuPont Outstanding Young Faculty Award, and a 1996 recipient of a National Science Foundation Career Award. He is now Chair of the La Mer Award Committee for the American Chemical Society.

Lynn M. Walker is an Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering and Chemistry (by courtesy) at Carnegie Mellon. She holds a B.S. from the University of New Hampshire and a Ph.D. from the University of Delaware, both in chemical engineering. She was an NSF International Postdoctoral Fellow at the Katholieke Universiteit in Leuven, Belgium before joining Carnegie Mellon University in 1997. Her research focuses on quantifying the coupling between flow behavior and flow-induced microstructure in complex fluids, including the study of two-phase polymer blends, polymer-surfactant aggregates and viscoelastic polymer solutions. She is the recipient of the DuPont Young Faculty Research Grant and in 2001 received a National Science Foundation Career Award. She received the 2000 Kun Li Award for Excellence in Education from the Department of Chemical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon.


Dr. Annette Jacobson
Department of Chemical Engineering
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213