Toothpaste manufacturing is surprisingly chaotic—solid particles swell, polymers tangle, and air bubbles sneak in, turning a simple mixture into a complex mess that industry struggles to control. This project tackles a fundamental gap in knowledge: no one has systematically mapped how toothpaste ingredients behave during processing, especially for non-water-based pharmaceutical pastes. Manufacturers currently rely on trial and error, leading to inefficiency and unreliable product quality. The team will precisely measure how particles swell and interact, then build mathematical equations that treat the whole mixture as a single material, enabling computer simulations of real processing conditions. If successful, the work could make toothpaste production more efficient and reliable, cutting waste and energy use. It could also help companies like GSK and inkjet-printing firm Xaar develop new formulations—perhaps pastes with specialised active ingredients or novel textures—that current guesswork cannot achieve. The research is fundamentally about understanding complex soft materials, but its industrial partnerships ensure the findings will directly improve manufacturing processes that quietly supply billions of tubes each year.
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Toothpastes - and especially specialised pharmaceutical toothpastes, whose major gel component is not water-based - have a surprisingly complex and ill-understood manufacturing process. There is the background fluid, which is already a mixture of a viscous liquid and a polymer; then solid particles are added. These are abrasive and do much of the tooth cleaning; but they also swell during processing, and the system becomes much thicker when they are added. Finally surfactant is added to help the toothpaste to foam in the mouth; and just to complicate matters further, air bubbles also creep in during processing. In this project, we will systematically address all the stages of toothpaste processing. We will carry out precise small-scale rheological measurements to discover how the particles swell and how they interact once they have swollen: for example, do they absorb parts of the long polymer molecules to form a network, or do partly-absorbed polymers act as "brushes" to push swollen particles apart? We will also measure the overall behaviour of each stage of the system (the background fluid on its own, or with particles, or with bubbles) and create a phase map of system behaviour in terms of its composition. We will use advanced mathematical modelling techniques to derive new equations that can describe the behaviour of a mixture - for example, background fluid and swollen particles - as if it were a single material. Finally, we will use our new constitutive equations in computer simulations to predict the behaviour of the paste in a real processing environment, address the manufacturing challenges such novel formulations entail and propose new strategies to overcome these. The research needs a team with many different specialist abilities, across experimentation, modelling and simulation, and also needs close ties with industry to ensure we are asking the right questions. GSK is a major collaborator on this project. The project is also supported by Xaar the leader in inkjet printing technology. With the understanding we generate, they hope to make their manufacturing processes both more efficient and more reliable and also develop new formulations to address future customer needs.
Helen Wilson (Co-Investigator)Luca Mazzei (Co-Investigator)Manish K. Tiwari (Co-Investigator)Panagiota Angeli (Principal Investigator)Stavroula Balabani (Co-Investigator)
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