The last time you spread cream cheese on a bagel, did you note how easy (or difficult) it was to spread? Do you routinely shake your salad dressing to re-mix the separated oil and vinegar?
Valentine’s Day is usually about hearts, flowers, and sweet messages, but this year, we found romance somewhere unexpected: inside a rheometer. With two iconic chocolates as our leading characters, milk chocolate and milk chocolate wrapped in a white crème embrace, we discovered that chocolate has a lot to teach us about love, chemistry, and how relationships behave under heat, pressure, and time.
Grab your favorite mug and get ready for a caffeinated clash of titans! We all know that coffees produced in different regions are distinct; like wine, the taste will vary with soil, climate, and altitude. Some of our lab members are partial to the distinct flavors from Colombia and Brazil when it comes to their cups of coffee.
Will your paint stick to the wall or drip off? Does your low-fat cream cheese have the same texture as a full-fat version? How will new ingredients affect your formulation’s texture and application, especially as environmental conditions change? Rheology offers invaluable insights that help researchers, developers, and engineers across numerous industries optimize their products for performance and customer satisfaction.
A testament to the march of scientific inquiry, thermogravimetry emerged through the integration of three individual inventions in the 19th and 20th centuries: the electric furnace, the thermocouple, and the microbalance. As a cornerstone of material science, chemistry, and various other industries, thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) has since developed in leaps and bounds. Today, TA Instruments are leading the way in TGA, and we welcome you to join us as we explore the workings and applications of this groundbreaking technique.
Powders are a big part of everyday life, from baking and laundry to cosmetics and pharmaceuticals. Understanding powder rheology—how powders flow and deform—is crucial for optimizing their use in various applications. This knowledge helps industries maintain consistency and product quality.
Rheology is a notoriously complex field, combining mathematics and physics to characterize materials. For inexperienced users, rheology can seem like a massive challenge. Luckily, new technology simplifies rheology down to its core so you can get essential measurements without difficult training, measurements, or calculations.
Our world is brimming with viscoelastic materials: The dough you knead before baking a fresh loaf, the Silly Putty your toddler slaps against the wall, the rubber gaskets that create an airtight seal on an airplane door. Testing those materials by applying controlled deformations (strains) or forces (stresses) at various timescales, temperatures, and/or humidities allows for the optimization of properties and ensures durability and safety.
I love a good experiment in the kitchen, especially when it involves baking and desserts. In celebration of Pi Day, let’s take science and experiments into the kitchen with pie dough and fillings…and a rheometer.
On holiday tables across the world, an unexpected unsung hero can make or break the meal: gravy. The seemingly simple condiment adds a dash of flavor to the star roast, livens up potatoes, and can rescue even the driest turkey that may accidentally make its way to the table.
Whether researchers are optimizing the texture of yogurt or studying adhesives’ curing, rheometry helps us understand materials and predict their behavior. Rheometry measures the amount of deformation a material or liquid undergoes when a force is applied. The combination of stress, strain and shear behavior forms the basis of rheology, the science of the deformation of materials.