Washing at lower temperatures is preferable, but what if you could do your week’s washing at just 15°C?
Chemists, biologists and engineers from the University of Warwick think this might be possible after discovering that nanodiamonds – pieces of carbon less than ten-thousandths the diameter of a human hair – can help loosen crystallised fat from surfaces.
Researchers found that 5nm nanodiamond particles dramatically improved triglyceride lipid removal from a hydrophobic surface at room temperature using an anionic or non-ionic surfactant. Their results are published in ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces.
“We found that the 5nm diamonds changed the way detergents behaved at 25°C, doubling the amount of fat removed when using one particular commercial detergent molecule,” said research leader, Dr Andrew Marsh, from the Department of Chemistry.
“Even at temperatures as low as 15°C, otherwise hard-to-remove fat could be solubilised from a test surface.”
Researchers prepared nanodiamond-surfactant colloids and measured the stability by dynamic light scattering. They also used quartz crystal microbalance-dissipation to compare their ability to remove surface-bound model triglyceride lipid with ionic and non-ionic aqueous surfactants at 15-25°C.
They observed a clear improvement in removal of triglycerides, even at 15°C, both with nanodiamond-surfactant colloids and by prior nanoparticle deposition on an interfacial lipid, showing that nanodiamonds can play a crucial role in enhancing detergency process.
“The physical and chemical insight already gained paves the way for future research to explore how this unique behaviour might be exploited in other ways,” said Marsh.
The research – which also included scientists from Aston University – was funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and P&G plc.