ABSTRACT

For most consumers cleaning (clothes, dishes and floors) remains a daily and relatively expensive chore. The FMCG (fast moving consumer goods) industry has been selling products to make cleaning more effective for centuries and has also invested extensively into R&D for improving their performance for decades and yet consumer perceivable differences between products is rare. Has this mature industry reached a plateau in product performance and, equally important, is there any scope for further research in this field?

This seminar will be split into two major areas:

• Case studies where consumer perceivable innovation has happened based on rational technical understanding and/or where successful products have been launched based on a heuristic approach to soap making.

• Current surfactant & interfacial thermodynamics challenges: why do we need to worry about this and how will a better understanding deliver better product performance. Our approach to tackling these problems will be discussed with concerns of how current theories (regular solution theory and charged phase models) appear to be inadequate when studying commercial surfactant systems. The vision for how interfacial science can, possibly, be leveraged to deliver future consumer perceivable differentiation in product performance will also be outlined.