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Handheld contact angle instruments for surface analysis: the latest advances

Contact angle instruments measure the contact angle between a drop of test liquid and a substrate or coated surface. The data is used for calculating surface free energy (SFE), for example to determine the wettability of a workpiece in preparation for a bonding or coating process. Today’s contact angle instruments deliver reliable, reproducible data in around 1–2 seconds. This automated approach has clear advantages over conventional manual ink-based methods, which are slow, lack reproducibility, and are dependent on the technician’s individual assessment.

The latest handheld contact angle instruments, such as the Mobile Surface Analyzer – MSA, for the factory floor or lab open up opportunities for significant improvements in analytical performance in the automotive, aerospace, and other manufacturing industries. These mobile devices, which are light and compact in design, employ two separate droplets of different liquids (water and diiodomethane), delivered via innovative dosing technology.

A key advantage of these instruments is that they deliver data used to determine the polar and dispersive components of the SFE. This aspect of the measurement process, which is not feasible with ink-based methods such as dyne pens, provides a very accurate assessment of wettability to maintain or even enhance the quality of our client's products.