Importance of surface tension characterization for food, pharmaceutical and packaging products: a review

This article reviews the various theoretical approaches that have been developed for determination of the surface tension of solids, and the applications to food industrial products. The surface tension of a solid is a characteristic of surface properties and interfacial interactions such as adsorption, wetting or adhesion. The knowledge of surface tension is thus of great interest for every domain involved in understanding these mechanisms, which recover a lot of industrial investigations. Indeed, it is the case for the packaging industry, the food materials science, the biomedical applications and the pharmaceutical products, cleaning, adhesive technology, painting, coating and more generally all fields in relation with wettability of their systems. There is however no direct method for measurements of surface tension of solids, except the contact angle measurements combined with an appropriate theoretical approach are indirect methods for estimation of surface tension of solids. Moreover, since the publication by Young (1805) who developed the basis of the theory of contact angle some two hundred years ago, measurements and interpretations are still discussed in scientific literature, pointing out the need to better understand the fundamental mechanisms of solid-liquid interfacial interactions. Applications of surface tension characterization in the field of food materials science are detailed, especially for packaging and coating applications, which recover different actual orientations in order to improve process and quality.