Fast Drying and Film Formation of Latex Dispersions Studied with FTIR Spectroscopic Imaging James A. Kimber, † Matthias Gerst, ‡ and Sergei G. Kazarian *,† Department of Chemical Engineering, Imperial College London, London, SW7 2AZ, United Kingdom, and BASF Advanced Chemicals Co., Ltd., GMU/SD, 300 Jiang Xin Sha Road, Pudong Shanghai 200137, P. R. China E-mail: s.kazarian@imperial.ac.uk Abstract Drying of thin latex films (≈20 μm) at high drying speeds (of the order of sec- onds) has been studied by fast chemical imaging. ATR-FTIR spectroscopic imaging combined with a fast “kinetic” mode was used to acquire spectral images without co- addition, enabling the amount of water and homogeneity of drying film to be studied over time. Drying profiles, constructed from analysing the water content in each im- age, show two stages of drying, a fast and a slow region. The formulation of latex dispersions affects the onset of slow drying and the volume fraction of water remain- ing at the onset of slow drying. In this work, the effect of physical properties, film thickness and glass transition temperature (T g ), were investigated, as well as the ef- fect of monomer composition where two monomoers, 2-Ethylhexylacrylate (EHA) and * To whom correspondence should be addressed † Department of Chemical Engineering, Imperial College London, London, SW7 2AZ, United Kingdom ‡ BASF Advanced Chemicals Co., Ltd., GMU/SD, 300 Jiang Xin Sha Road, Pudong Shanghai 200137, P. R. China 1 brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk provided by Spiral - Imperial College Digital Repository