WETTING ANGLES OF SWELLABLE POWDERS

Abstract

Powders with the ability to swell are widely used in the building materials industry in the production of wood-polymer composites and elastomers. In this regard, the choice of compatible polymer binders and swellable powder fillers becomes an important task. Such a selection can be carried out using surface tension determined by the OWRK method as an information parameter, taking raw components having close values of the polar and dispersion components, eliminating a possible imbalance of intermolecular forces at the filler-polymer binder interface. However, when using this approach, the problem of obtaining reproducible wetting angles of swellable powders arises - the solution to this problem, in the case of using modern goniometers as measuring equipment, was the goal of this work. It was found that for swellable powder materials (saponite-containing material, wood flour), in comparison with quartz powder, to determine the pseudo-equilibrium contact angle, it is necessary to carry out a corrective change in the position of the baseline by the level of the boundary of the swollen material.