>> Hi. I'm Ron Sicker.
I'm the Project Manager for the experiment known
as the Advanced Colloid Experiment
at the NASA Glenn Research Center,
and we just completed our first experiment.
It was a successful experiment, with my colleague here
at Procter & Gamble, Principal Scientist Matt Lynch,
and my Project Scientist Bill Meyer
from the NASA Glenn Research Center.
And we thought that we would come and have a debrief and talk
about the mission, but also, it got some curiosity going.
Being an engineer, I got thinking of how scientists
and engineers interact to do these experiments.
So with my engineering curiosity,
I asked the experts how
to remove some very difficult coffee stains from my carpet,
and they said, "Use Dawn."
And I was looking at Dawn and I noticed how it can also be used
to take the crude oil off of a baby duckling.
So Matt, thanks for that, and maybe I'll put you
up to explain some of the spinoffs
and other uses for Dawn.
>> It's very good.
It's great for cleaning sinks, too, I understand.
>> Cleaning sinks too, I understand.
>> Yes, cleaning clogs.
Very good stuff.
Yeah.
>> And there's lots of ingredients
in a product like this, or...
>> Yes. Quite a few.
Surfactants, solvents, water, things like that.
Sometimes some electrolytes.
And you've got to pack it all really tight together so it fits
in a small bottle and keep it nice and clear like that.
So it's a bit of a trick.
>> Yeah, to make it work.
So as I was looking around the house, I found all kind
of other things that might pique my curiosity.
>> Oh, boy.
>> Another one was the amazing gel
where the particles never sink.
>> Yes. Of course, now, it's very relevant
to our ACE experiment, right?
You know, because -- so what you have are some particles
that are suspended in the fluid;
fluid being the surfactant system.
>> Yep.
>> And normally, just like maybe like a beach ball or something
like that, it's the density difference between the fluid
and the little particle; like a beach ball is like going
to rise up to the top.
So what one has to do is figure out a clever way to kind of keep
that from rising while sometimes keep it
from sinking other products, too.
And at the same time, when I push this little button,
it's got to be able to kind of come out -- has a nice material,
nice easy-flowing material.
So the trick is how to make all that work, and you know,
one of the interesting things about this is,
when you shake it, you kind of notice it kind of vibrates
and jiggles a little bit.
>> Yep.
>> And so what people do is they create what they call a yield
stress fluid, and that's the idea of putting in a --
for example, in this case, a polymer.
And the polymer kind of weaves itself together into like a net,
or a little mesh, and that mesh itself is sufficient
to hold all the particles in place.
But if you push too hard on the net, the net breaks,
and everything floats just like water.
The ACE experiments are similar to that,
so we use little particles, little colloids.
Smaller than you could ever see by your eye,
like the size of a pin.
We're going to put those in there, and we're going to try
to assemble them in ways that provide the same functionality.
So the net, the net holds all the particles in place,
and then be able to break that net up into small pieces
when we push on that lever.
So when we go to space, you can see these events on a timescale
of 10,000, 100,000 times longer than it might happen on Earth,
and that's the, I guess the reason
that we're all in the same business.
Procter & Gamble's in the business of overcoming gravity
in some of their products;
that's why a properly designed product doesn't sink
or separate.
>> Yeah.
>> But we go to space to overcome gravity --
of course, we use rockets and we use the space station.
But we all share that overlap of spinoffs and using,
overcoming gravity to do our mission.
>> Well, you know, and from a basic science point of view,
if I want to understand how to design a system like this,
you know, one of the challenges is
that gravity has a lot of complexity.
It's a whole understanding of the problem.
So as things begin to settle, they push fluid around,
you get hydrodynamic components, that pushes other particles.
I want to understand the basic physics around this kind
of re-orientation and re-sedimentation of all
of the different particulates, these little colloids in there,
then I have to get gravity in on that equation.
So that's what affords us a really neat opportunity
in a zero-G environment.
>> So I remember you explaining this back in 2009.
I think you were at a microgravity competition.
We were actually going to fly an experiment in space.
And it ultimately came into a whole set
of experiments you're flying in space right now.
And from what I understand, you're getting,
not only pleasant results, but pleasant surprises.
>> Yeah, yeah.
>> Can you tell us some of this?
>> Yeah, well, okay.
So if I was to take a product
and we suspend all these colloids in to make it,
they begin to move in time, just like in the same way just
with a little bit of heat, it's what we call Brownian motion --
things move and they jiggle -- and those structures,
those little nets begin to change, they'll change in time,
to the point where they don't function properly anymore.
And for us it is understood
that it becomes a more complex problem
when those little particulates,
those little colloids are different than each other,
a little bit different in nature, a little different
in size, say, for example.
Very typical for what we formulate and make with,
but not really well studied in literature.
Most people want to be very clean, very pure on things.
So we're making kind of a middle step, and what we find is
that when we put these kind of impurities in there,
the polydispersity of small materials,
the physics looks a little different
than is typically noted.
All the materials move around at different rates.
Small things and big things do different kinds of things,
lead to lots of different dynamics.
For us, that dynamics leads
to how long these little balls stay suspended.
>> So I remember when you were talking, this 2009 presentation,
the people were really excited because you were talking
about what would happen if we understood the products better,
understood the stabilizers better.
And what was a surprise for me was
that the stabilizer's a major part of the product.
What it is, is it's something that actually doesn't interfere
with the product and allows it to be itself, but without it --
>> Well, that's, you know, that's what we're trying to do,
is it's something that allows you to then go ahead
and make the product efficacious in some way.
So, and for example, in a shampoo,
that might be the little silicon oils that get on your hair
that make your hair feel good and have a chance to comb it,
dry it faster, comb it better, things like that.
You can't do that sort of thing, often,
without stabilizing the product appropriately.
So in and of itself, often it's supposed to be benign,
it's supposed to be there, it helps you make the product,
makes the product work.
In and of itself often doesn't have a lot of function.
It can, but it's a necessary component to make a lot
of these materials, a lot of these products work properly.
>> So I also heard you say that if you get a good stabilizer
and you really understand it,
which is something that's really hard to do at the moment,
and while you're doing the space experiments, then you'd be able
to make much smaller packages and you'd have...
>> Conceptually, yeah.
I mean, a lot of things are possible.
I mean, you can imagine suspending different sorts
of things that you can't do now, different sorts of actives,
different sorts of materials of interest.
Right now they may be too heavy for a net,
so they just, yeah, punch through.
But you know, those things become more possible
by having things that you understand how to do.
And you know, frankly from a, you know, research
and development perspective, we want to make something
like this, get it out to people to help them so they don't get,
you know, germs and things on their hands, and you want
to make this product as quick as possible.
If you often formulate in the dark and make things
in the dark, in the sense, the proverbial sense, in the dark,
when you're going to go out and you're just going
to make some mesh, it takes a long time to make that work.
If you have some directive design,
you know what you're going to need, you know something
about the composition of things, the attractive nature
of particles, the sizes of all, how that works,
then you can make that very quick.
And that helps everybody.
It helps the company, it helps the consumers.
So if you think about something like this,
it seems somewhat benign -- it's a hand sanitizer,
has a lot of great function, and P&G products touch
about 4-1/2 billion people on the planet each day.
Roughly a third of the entire population.
So our ability to help people's lives, come back and make things
that help people's lives is just great for everybody.
>> You had said that if you use textbook-size particles,
which are all the same size, then you can model it
and use computers to understand and predict,
but that's not what you produce.
Textbook particles don't exist.
>> That's right.
Yeah. And actually part of the surprise that we're finding
with the experiments -- well, I say "surprise we're finding
with the experiments"; it's a little bit
of about how that physics differs.
We can see that ion a microscopic sense,
we can see that on a bulk sense with some
of the CASIS work as well.
But we've kind of known that for a long time
in the formulation work, so where you go ahead
and you change the nature of the materials that you're trying to,
making as you're suspending,
and those dynamics change quite a bit.
Something that may be very good for several months or a year.
Mix things up in a slightly different way
with different kinds of materials,
different size materials, all of a sudden leads to a couple weeks
of how you predict that, you know?
How do you understand that?
How do you know that?
That something that's right now beyond our ability to deal with.