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Education & Outreach

The center is active in outreach activities, particularly to K-12 students and their teachers. In an effort to popularize surface science to students we have come up with a number of simple demonstration experiments that can explain the concepts of surface tension, Marangoni flow, surface curvature, wetting and hydrophobicity as well heat transfer across surfaces. Each of our experiments can be performed with materials commonly available in hardware stores or local chemical supply firms. Click on the various links to try these experiments with your schools. As always wear safety gear where appropriate and follow common safety rules.

In the following sections, we have prepared a number of experiments that demonstrate physical phenomena associated with interfacial and surface science. The ideas behind surface tension, micelle formation, wetting, Marangoni flow, surface heat transfer and convection are explained briefly. Where possible, we show a movie clip.

Please send us your feedback via email to surfsci@che.ufl.edu

Surface Tension

    The paper clip experiment

The Marangoni Effect

    Pepper and soap experiment

    The Soap Powered Boat experiment

    Microvelia

    Microvelia2

Critical Micelle Concentration

    The CMC demonstration

Wetting and dewetting

    The Iodine finger printing experiment

Emulsions

    Experiment to be added

The Young Laplace equation and Curvature

    The balloon experiment

    The liquid thread experiment

Heat transfer across surfaces

    Heating the balloon

Miscible interfaces

    The thimble experiment

Convection

    Convection experiment