Looking forward to XVIth International Congress on Rheology

I would like to first of all introduce myself since this is the first time I have blogged on this site. My name is John Duffy and I am one of the Product Technical Specialists for Rheometry Products based at Malvern’s Headquarters in the UK.

Before joining Malvern I spent a number of years in industry working in Research and Development, first at Unilever Port Sunlight and then Boots in Nottingham. At the ripe old age of thirty I finally decided to risk financial ruin by doing a PhD at Nottingham University looking at the rheology and microstructure of coal as it undergoes carbonization. A far cry from working with detergents and cosmetics!!

On completion of my PhD I was lucky enough to be offered a position at Malvern and now work with customers across the globe in support of our rheology products, assisting with a diverse range of applications as well as contributing to the development of our next generation of rheology products.

One of these next generation applications is Microrheology which allows rheological characterization of a material on the micro-scale by measuring the random thermally-driven motion of tracer particles by means of Dynamic Light Scattering (DLS). This is a complimentary technique to our rotational rheometer offering (Kinexus) and has significant advantages when measuring complex fluids which have very weakly elastic and stress sensitive micro-structures, such as dilute polymer and protein solutions.

I will be presenting this work at the upcoming XVIth International Congress on Rheology which is a key event in Malvern’s 2012 calendar and one which we are proud to be a major sponsor of. This event takes place every four years and will be held at the Belém Cultural Centre in Lisbon, Portugal on this occasion.  My talk is entitled ‘DLS based Optical Microrheology of Complex Fluids’ and I will also be presenting a poster entitled ‘Optimized Methodology for DLS Microrheology’.

This event attracts the world’s leading rheologists to present recent advances in the field of rheology, but also offers the opportunity for us at Malvern to catch up with our customers from across the globe. The event runs from the 5th to the 10th August and I look forward to seeing some of you there. Try not to miss the gala dinner on Thursday 9th that Malvern are sponsoring, as this evening is one of the very entertaining and highly enjoyable social highlights of the meeting! For those not able to attend the ICR, don’t worry, we will keep you updated here on our Materials Talks blog.