Does Ethylhexylglycerin Change Ink Flow Characteristics? I Think Not, Based On Surface Tension

[Maurizio]

I can attest that bleach works to remove BSB - as long as the surface it’s on can handle it - I have easily removed BSB stains in my steel kitchen sink with a spray household cleaner containing not even 100% bleach.

[piojo]

Yes, bleach removes Baystate Blue staining, but that's neither here nor there. The point is that after cleaning, the nib and feed are still full of BSB residue which cannot be removed with water/soap/ammonia. If cleaning fluids won't remove them, then naturally flowing ink probably won't remove them. It's not the purpose of this thread so I won't rant too much, but we need to keep BSB from drying into these deposits, not merely know how to clean them out. Unless you're going to mix some bleach into your ink, it's not going to keep BSB from clogging.

[Sholom]

Sorry for the late followup. i don't know where i got this, but I thought PhotoFlo was one of the Pluronic surfactants rather than Triton X-100. In any case, the surfactant chosen is preferably a nonionic one, which rules out most dish soaps (which contain Aerosol-OT). The reason is that Aerosol-OT is anionic; while most ink dyes are probably anionic (and hence won't interact with the Aerosol-OT), it is possible that certain inks may contain nonionic or cationic dyes whose solubility could be affected by an anionic surfactant.

 

The downside of Triton X-100 is that many countries are moving to restrict its use because it may contain estrogenic impurities(like one of its starting materials). There are excellent replacements but they may be harder for amateurs to get their hands on them. If I was making my own inks now and had my druthers and the equipment to measure very small amounts of fluids, I would use Surfynol 465 as the wetting agent of choice. I don't know how an amateur formulator could get their hands on it though. Any of the ones I've mentioned should be significantly stronger wetting agents than ethylhexylglycerol. Note also that what matters in ink flow is not surface tension (which happens at a liquid/air interface) but interfacial tension (liquid/solid interface, where the solid is the materials of the nib and feed). These two types of tensions roughly parallel one another, but there are many exceptions to that corrrelation.