Composite Liquid Products: Design and Performance

The demands made of formulated liquid products by consumers continue to increase in complexity. As a result, we require a more sophisticated ability to design novel functions, control consumer benefits, and manufacture these products robustly. Fluid products are still often conceived, formulated, and tested using assumptions of homogeneous behavior, or by focusing on microstructural elements for specific insights. However, new product design paradigms emphasize the use of multifunctional and hierarchical elements of fluid products, essentially as liquid composites, to deliver entirely new consumer benefits. Two fascinating aspects of complex fluid transport, inhomogeneous flow and two-fluid microstructures, will be demonstrated experimentally in formulated systems as a means of integrating such benefits into products. Novel rheometry techniques will be used to describe composite flows in formulated sparse networks of cellulose nanofibers. Once discussed as barriers to accurate bulk fluid characterization, we argue that these novel flows are now an enabler of new product features and increased efficiency and performance.