Contact Angle Measurement Equipment
Contact angle measurement provides valuable insights into surface properties, allowing you to assess wettability, adhesion, and the surface energy of materials. This technique is important for optimising surface treatments, ensuring quality control in manufacturing processes, and developing advanced materials with specific surface characteristics across industries such as electronics, pharmaceuticals, automotive, and biomedical engineering. It is an extremely versatile technique used for characterisation of both liquids and solids.
The most common technique for measuring contact angle is the sessile drop method: a droplet of liquid is deposited on the solid surface. The droplet is illuminated from behind, an image is captured using a high-resolution camera, and the the image is analysed using specialised software to determine the contact angle.
Contact angle is typically measured using an Optical Tensiometer (sometimes known as a contact angle meter or a goniometer). The basic components of this are a light source, a high-resolution camera, a stage (tilting capability is useful), a liquid dispenser, and some analysis software. The most capable equipment can capture drop images and automatically analyse the drop shape as a function of time. The drop shape is function of the surface tension of the liquid, gravity and the density difference between sample liquid and surrounding medium. Deposited on a solid, the liquid forms a drop with a contact angle that also depends on the solid’s surface free energy. The captured image is analysed with software using a drop profile fitting method in order to determine contact angle and surface tension.
The use of high technology test instrumentation like optical tensiometers provides non-destructive test methods to allow an accurate, objective and repeatable analysis to be made. Using the optical tensiometers you can compare the effects of a range of surface treatments and gather data that correlates to various surface conditions e.g. lubricity, wettability, surface free energy, surface tension, interfacial tension, and more – as well as contact angle.
Dyne Testing (an Intertronics brand) is the UK distributor for the Attension® state-of-the-art range of Optical Tensiometers manufactured by Biolin Scientific. They feature: an intuitive user interface, making them easy to operate; marketing leading software which is included with your instrument purchase; and a modern, functional design.
The Surface Analyst™ is Brighton Science’s handheld surface inspection device that allows you to rapidly quantify the quality of material surfaces after cleaning processes and before applications such as bonding, coating, sealing, painting or printing.
The SITA SurfaSpector is used for fast, easy testing of the wettability of metal, glass and plastic surfaces. The device combines an objective contact angle measurement with simple handling and allows a reliable assessment of the surface.
These instruments are available for you to evaluate in the Intertronics Technology Centre. Please pay us a visit, and let us help you with your contact angle measuring requirements.
