So...it's midnight in the middle of a long week. I've been tired all week and really not motivated to choose a project topic for my Interfacial Phenomena class to add to all of the other stuff I need to get done. I have found a possible topic that might be interesting, but wanted to check my basic understanding of the concept before I committed to analyzing it. This is why I just spent 10-15 minutes in my kitchen happily watching the interaction of olive oil, water, and a surfactant (aka dish soap) in a container with a hydrophobic surface (aka non-stick cooking pot) and a container with a hydrophilic surface (aka a water glass) and being absurdly satisfied that it was behaving as I had predicted it would.* Yay kitchen science experiments!
Hi, my name is Onyx, and I am a geek.
*In case any of my fellow geeks want in on the fun:
Put oil on the bottom of the non-stick pan, then add water. Because the surface is hydrophobic, an oil film can remain between the surface and the water rather than floating up, even though the oil is less dense than water. If you add soap to the water near the oil film, enabling the water to better wet the surface, the oil film will slowly contract into droplets that float up to the surface. On the hydrophilic surface (e.g. glass), the oil floats as soon as the water is added, no surfactant required.
