Langmuir trough experiment

You may have done the Langmuir trough experiment in a physical chemistry practical class. This involves measuring the size of a molecule by allowing an oil to spread on the surface of water in a uni molecular layer. 

EXAMPLE 9.2 What is the fundamental equation when surface area is the independent variable Find the function whose extremum identifies the state of equilibriinn for constant T, p, N, and surface area a. In the Langmuir trough experiment, this corresponds to holding the bar at fixed position, and determining what force applied to the bar will hold it there. Again start with Equation (9.3), but do not subtract d(ya) as you did in Equation (9.4). 

Because the adsorbed HM-HEC molecules exhibit such slow rates of chain reorientation, the effects of molecular weight, amount of hydrophobic substitution and chain lengths of the hydrophobes on the interfacial properties of HM-HEC monolayers can be investigated by two kinds of dynamic experiments hysteresis and stress-jump, using a Langmuir trough film balance. 

An HM-HEC monolayer at the air/aqueous interface was formed by adsorption from an aqueous solution of the polymer placed in the Langmuir trough overnight. In "stress-jump" experiments, HM-HEC monolayers were placed under rapid compression to a large degree and surface pressure was measured as a function of time after compression was stopped. (The compressional "jumps" required a minute or two to complete, and in some cases were on the order of the polymer monolayer relaxation times. See later section for discussion). In hysteresis experiments, the adsorbed monolayers were subjected to continuous compression-expansion cycles at a specific speed, while surface pressure was determined as a function of surface area. 

This way it has been possible to observe the anticipated conformational transition by experiment. Cylindrical brushes of polybutylacrylate-graft polymethacrylate were adsorbed on the surface of water from a CHCI3 solution on a Langmuir trough and studied by recording the tt-A (surface pressure vs molecular area) isotherm. At different stages of compression, the monolayer was... 

In a typical experiment, a small volume of an insoluble surface-active material (dissolved in a water-insoluble solvent such as benzene) is placed atop a clean water surface. As the solvent evaporates away, a film remains and the moving barrier can be adjusted so that the surface film exerts pressure on the mica float. A calibrated torsion balance is used to measure the force that the film exerts on the float. That force divided by the length of the float is the force per unit length or the surface pressure. For studies of lipolysis kinetics , a Langmuir trough can be constructed so that one can measure lipase action under first-order and zero-order conditions. 

There are many applications of ellipsometry in the measurement of mono-layer and sub-monolayer films. The theory of the optical signal to be expected from an adsorbed layer less than one monolayer thick has been placed on a firm footing by Smith [15] in some elegant experiments on adsorption in a Langmuir trough. Simultaneous ellipsometric and surface potential measurements were made on various molecules spread in thin layers on mercury as the surface pressure was varied. One conclusion was the simple result that the effective thickness divided by the thickness of the island molecules in the adsorbed islands was equal to the fractional coverage of the surface area. 

Another familiar experiment is the compression or dilation of insoluble monolayers on a Langmuir trough. By this operation the film passes different states, such as mesophases. The transition of the film fi-om one state into another needs time, which is a characteristic parameter for such processes starting from a non-equilibrium state and directed to the reestablishment of equilibrium. The principle of "relaxation" coordinates for any process was first introduced by Maxwell (1868) in his work on relaxations of tensions. After Maxwell, a liquid body under deformation can be described by the shear stress... 

Serrien et al. (1992) measured the damping of planar longitudinal waves, generated with a barrier on a Langmuir trough and detected with a Wilhelmy balance. The longitudinal waves correspond to slow periodic compressions/dilations of the protein adsorption layer (BSA, casein). The results for BSA are shown in Fig. 6.18. Further experiments using a stress... 

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