Thinning of wetting films formed from aqueous solutions of non-ionic surfactant

Recent experimental advances for understanding bubble-particle attachment in flotation

Bubble-particle interaction is of great theoretical and practical importance in flotation. Significant progress has been achieved over the past years and the process of bubble-particle collision is reasonably well understood. This, however, is not the case for bubble-particle attachment leading to three-phase contact line formation due to the difficulty in both theoretical analysis and experimental verification. For attachment, surface forces play a major role. They control the thinning and rupture of the liquid film between the bubble and the particle. The coupling between force, bubble deformation and film drainage is critical to understand the underlying mechanism responsible for bubble-particle attachment. In this review we first discuss the advances in macroscopic experimental methods for characterizing bubble-particle attachment such as induction timer and high speed visualization. Then we focus on advances in measuring the force and drainage of thin liquid films between an air bubble and a solid surface at a nanometer scale. Advances, limits, challenges, and future research opportunities are discussed. By combining atomic force microscopy and reflection interference contrast microscopy, the force, bubble deformation, and liquid film drainage can be measured simultaneously. The simultaneous measurement of the interaction force and the spatiotemporal evolution of the confined liquid film hold great promise to shed new light on flotation.

Combining imaging ellipsometry and grazing incidence small angle X-ray scattering for in situ characterization of polymer nanostructures

A combination of microbeam grazing incidence small angle X-ray scattering (muGISAXS) and imaging ellipsometry is introduced as a new versatile tool for the characterization of nanostructures. muGISAXS provides a local lateral and depth-sensitive structural characterization, and imaging ellipsometry adds the position-sensitive determination of the three-dimensional morphology in terms of thickness, roughness, refractive index, and extinction coefficient. Together muGISAXS and imaging ellipsometry enable a complete characterization of structure and morphology. On the basis of an example of buildup of nanostructures from monodisperse colloidal polystyrene nanospheres on a rough solid support, the scope of this new combination is demonstrated. Roughness is introduced by a dewetting structure of a diblock copolymer film with one block being compatible with the colloidal nanoparticles and one block being incompatible. To demonstrate the potential for kinetic investigations, muGISAXS and imaging ellipsometry are applied to probe the drying process of an aqueous dispersion of nanospheres on such a type of rough substrate.