New software aids testing of soft-condensed materials
Soft-condensed materials, like the shampoos we use and some of the foods we eat, are a constant presence in every day life. Upon production they need to be tested regarding their reactions, electrostatics, surface effects, etc. before being made available to the general public. Previously, such tests could only be conducted using complicated and costly programmes which applied either molecular or macroscale analyses to these substances. However, it has become increasingly apparent that soft-condensed materials are best tested for their properties, neither at the microscopic nor at the macroscopic level. Their structures are best determined at what is known as the mesoscale, typically between 10 to 1000 nanometres, i.e. somewhere between what can only be analysed under a microscope and what is immediately apparent to the human eye. The newly developed software known as MESODYN helps to bridge this gap by predicting the size of structures at this in-between level, describing it in mathematical terms and then programming the computer to do all the hard work. New and powerful computational techniques were used to achieve this result at reasonable costs, all of which will make MESODYN a valuable tool in the chemical and pharmaceutical industries in the near future, as a means of attaining accurate results in soft-condensed material testing while saving time and money.
