A&D’s theme since its foundation has been that we equally emphasize analog and digital technologies and create our competitive edge based on both technologies. When the world is found to be moving rapidly toward digital, our proposition of having both analog and digital technologies seems to be something of the past. But our belief in analog has remained unchanged. More specifically, to differentiate ourselves from our competitors, our competitive edge should be derived from analog technologies while exploiting the fruit of the digital world, and this has led us to the development of various sensors and high speed and high precision analog circuitries. Such initiative has been driven by the fact that sensing nature or detecting natural phenomena is basically analog. Analog sensing technologies are the means to convert nature to measurable quantities while digital technologies enhance the usefulness of the measured quantities. The basic need for a tool is to be an interface between human and nature, which is in essence analog.
Recently I have learned one very interesting application that may have great potential for SV-10, Sine-wave Vibro Viscometer. A subsidiary of a well-established US chemical company introduced body soap; liquid soap in a plastic bottle you often find on the wall next to the shower nozzle these days. You just squeeze the bottle while holding your palm below the container’s nozzle, get liquid soap dispensed onto your palm and spread it over your body. (Hand soap is another product that is similar in nature.) Because it is liquid, it spreads evenly quickly and easily, making showering so easy. Though the concept of the product was well received and the product quickly began appearing in the bathrooms of fancy hotels and private homes where young people prefer taking showers to the traditional Japanese bath, it turned out the soap is rather difficult to wash away. You don’t feel fresh because you can still feel the stickiness of the soap even after rinsing your body with a hot shower for a long time. I had such experience myself a few times at hotels abroad, and I figured then the soap must have an oily ingredient intentionally added, and decided that was not the product for me and went back to using conventional soap.
Mr. Takeyuki Tanaka, who is considered to be a mentor or professor to A&D’s sales force as well as to most of our customers in the rheology field or polymer industry, was asked to resolve this problem. In actuality the liquid soap in question can be difficult to spread out, hard to wash away as in the above case, or your skin gets sour after it dries. Such characteristics are the result of how the skin reacts to the soap’s ingredients, how these ingredients become wet on the skin or how they get resolved in water or get dried in the air.
In order to detect the wash-ability of the soap, he devised an interesting way of using the CJV-5000 (Predecessor of SV-10) and RPT3000W, Rigid Body Pendulum type Physical Properties Testing Instrument, which measures rheologial or viscoelastic changes during curing or drying processes
.
He glued artificial skin to the sensors of both instruments to measure how the soap reacts to skin and tested three different brands of body soap. With artificial skin on the sensors he figured that he could measure the effects of absorption and osmosis (penetration). With these set-ups he demonstrated the viscosity increase as the absorption and osmosis effects progress in general, while one brand out of the three showed an increase much greater than the other two. Then, he went on to pour water by using syringes onto the samples on the RPT3000W after the samples became stable in viscosity. He successfully demonstrated that the one brand of body soap which showed a different behavior again behaved very differently. That is, while the other two samples came to a stable point very quickly, the one in question decreased in viscosity very gradually and took much longer time to reach the stable point.
With the artificial skin on the sensors Mr. Tanaka consequently proved that the perfume additive the manufacturer chose to use is absorbed by the skin and this effect made it very difficult to wash away. In the end, the quality of the soap was improved as a result of this creative experimental set-up.
Since viscosity is friction of a liquid exerted on an object traveling in it, the material that makes the surface of the sensors will suggest differences in measured values. When phenomena like absorption and osmosis are involved, changes become a function of time, which may complicate the behavior of materials. Thus, the mere fact that you can easily glue different materials on the sensors of SV-10 suggest that we will have a lot of interesting applications on the research front in the future.
When we bring our SV-10 to a potential customer, we are very often bombarded with questions relating to correlation to the existing data taken by conventional methods. They cause barriers or even the rejection of our new technology, especially when people work with some industrial standards for quality control. However, great progress is being made in the areas where the conventional methods did not work or were found difficult to get meaningful results. As shown in the above case, gluing some artificial membrane on the vibrating sensors is one good example. We will continue to see such examples in various industries, where research for new materials and quality improvement are essential.
People tend to regard the established methods as if they were the norm, but we should be reminded of the fact that viscosity is method dependent and has limitations due to the chosen method one employs. A new method such as SV-10 that has great sensitivity and repeatability is appealing to many customers who are eager to find solutions to their problems and who are in the front line of research.
You may address any comments concerning this editorial by email to Mr. Eto
Index of Mr. Eto's other articles
Terms and Conditions