The Bad Habits of Crystals...and the Problems with your Solutions
Sometimes what you think will be the simplest things in science turn out to be the trickiest to predict, control, measure and explain. I often think that solubility is one of those properties - it should be easy to find out whether a material is soluble in a solvent and to measure how soluble it is, shouldn't it? But then you start worrying about whether your system has reached equilibrium and then you read about supersaturated solutions. And that's before you even start to think about the effects of particle size or impurities.
A related area is crystallisation. Why is it that sometimes your system forms crystals of a particular shape (or "habit") but sometimes they look completely different? Or maybe it's impossible even to get crystals at all.
Well it turns out that you can make a lot of progress in these areas when you understand some basic principles. This understanding can be used to help you formulate products (solutions or suspensions for instance) with the right properties and adequate stability.
With those thoughts in mind we've put together a short free webinar (Thursday 4th February, 13.00 GMT) which we think will be a good basic introduction to solubility and crystallisation. We will take you through the essentials of crystallisation and solubility, covering topics such as solubility measurement, solubility prediction, supersaturation, nucleation, crystal growth and crystal polymorphism. Then we will explore how these topics are practically related to the formulation of many agrochemical products. We've picked agrochemical formulations to illustrate the principles but of course the themes will be relevant to formulators of many other products as well.
We are pleased to announce that "iFormulate introduces...Crystallisation Science and Agrochemical Formulation" will be sponsored by Technobis Crystallisation Systems which provides laboratory hardware that enables you to carry out essential crystallisation and solubility studies.
We'd be delighted to welcome you to the webinar - just go to our registration page and fill in the form. We'll then send you joining instructions.