Surfactant Associates is a small, private corporation with expertise in advanced surfactant science and applications.
Surfactant Associates (SA) was founded in 1987 and performed contract research for industry and government agencies. In 1989 after the industrial sponsors of the University of Oklahoma’s Institute for Applied Surfactant Research requested a short course to introduce new employees to the basics of surfactant science and technology, SA held the first short course in Norman, Oklahoma. The goal of the course was to survey the most important and relevant aspects of surfactant behavior in an applied setting for scientists and engineers with a good background in chemistry, but minimal knowledge of surfactants.
As might be expected, the university faculty designed a one-week course, but the industrial representatives said they could only afford for employees to be away from their jobs for a single day. The compromise was a two-and-a-half day course. To reduce a week’s worth of material into half the time, we designed a short course in which we took the fundamental aspects of surfactant behavior from a wide range of applications—everything from emulsions and wetting to detergency and foams—and arranged them to be presented on the first day of the course. With this background, we are able to cover a wide variety of applications of surfactants to a significant depth in a surprisingly short time.
Since intellectual property and rights-to-publish issues sometimes make industrial projects difficult to carry-out directly with universities, we developed a protocol wherein the university would lease our labs to SA to carry out proprietary R&D projects for our clients.
As we now approach the 37th year of the company, we have taught our continually evolving short course on four continents to thousands of employees from hundreds of countries, and performed contract research for dozens of companies. This is still one of the most enjoyable activities for the principals, and one that we look forward to every time we have another opportunity to offer the course.
Visit the Resources page for selected publications of our own surfactant research.
