The technique involves lining a plastic bottle with microscopic y-shaped structures that cradle the droplets of soap aloft above tiny air pockets, so that the soap never actually touches the inside of the bottle. The \u201cy\u201d structures are built up using much smaller nanoparticles made of silica, or quartz\u2014an ingredient in glass\u2014which, when treated further, won\u2019t stick to soap.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s what you\u2019d call a first-world problem, right? \u2018I can\u2019t get all of the shampoo to come out of the bottle.\u2019 But manufacturers are really interested in this, because they make billions of bottles that end up in the garbage with product still in them. Coatings already exist to help food, but not soap, pour out of their containers. Compared to soaps, getting ketchup out of a bottle is trivial. Our coating repels liquids in general, but getting it to repel soap was the hard part.
\nThe key is\u00a0surface tension\u2014the tendency of the molecules of a substance to stick to each other. Ketchup and other sauces are made mostly of water, and water molecules tend to stick to each other more than they stick to plastic. But\u00a0surfactants\u2014the organic molecules that make soap \u201csoapy\u201d\u2014are just the opposite: They have a very low surface tension and stick to plastic easily.<\/p>\n
The Ohio State invention could actually aid recycling. Before plastic bottles can be recycled, they have to be rinsed completely clean.
\nWith further development, the university hopes to license the coating technique to manufacturers\u2014not just for shampoo bottles, but for other plastic products that have to stay clean, such as biomedical devices or catheters. They have already applied the same technique to polycarbonate, a plastic used in car headlights and smartphone cases, among other applications.<\/p>\n
Source: Ohio State University<\/p>\n
Image source: Fotolia<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It\u2019s one of life\u2019s little annoyances: that last bit of shampoo that won\u2019t quite pour out of the bottle. Or the last bit of hand soap, or dish soap, or laundry detergent. Now researchers at The Ohio State University have found a way to create the perfect texture inside plastic bottles to let soap products flow freely. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":12250,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12246","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nanotechnologie"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/innovationsgesellschaft.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12246","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/innovationsgesellschaft.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/innovationsgesellschaft.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/innovationsgesellschaft.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/innovationsgesellschaft.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12246"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/innovationsgesellschaft.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12246\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19884,"href":"http:\/\/innovationsgesellschaft.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12246\/revisions\/19884"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/innovationsgesellschaft.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12250"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/innovationsgesellschaft.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/innovationsgesellschaft.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/innovationsgesellschaft.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}