Fountain Pen Ink Behaviour / Fountain Pen Physics Journal Articles/references

[yamborghini]

Hi Everyone,

 

I have a university assignment on "soft matter" and would love to do it on fountain pen ink.

 

Just wondering if anyone has ever come across any articles on fountain pen ink behaviour such as, coagulation rates, particle sizes, viscosities or the physics of how a fountain pen works.

 

I'm aware that fountain pens work by reverse capillary action, but haven't been able to find any journal articles on it.

 

I've done a good search in vain hoping that I'd be able to find enough literature to write an assignment but have come up with scarce resources.

 

Perhaps there's a gold mine that I'm missing somewhere? Websites aren't good enough as references unfortunately, the articles need to be peer reviewed and published. This is pretty much a last ditch effort to keep my dream of doing my assignment on ink.

 

 

 

 

 

[ingolf]

Hi,

 

maybe you will find this Ph.D.thesis useful. But the thesis is completely written in German.

http://elib.uni-stuttgart.de/opus/volltexte/2008/3602/pdf/Diss_Waibel.pdf

 

Regards, Ingolf.

 

P.S.: Pages 9-18 include a summary in English.

[Morbus Curiositas]

Hi,

 

maybe you will find this Ph.D.thesis useful. But the thesis is completely written in German.

http://elib.uni-stuttgart.de/opus/volltexte/2008/3602/pdf/Diss_Waibel.pdf

 

Regards, Ingolf.

 

P.S.: Pages 9-18 include a summary in English.

Sehr interessant danke schön Ingolf

[basterma]

I would e-mail various ink manufacturers. Sometimes the direct approach may get you in through the gates of the castle. They may have copies of obscure journal articles that have been long forgotten. I imagine there was research done in the 20's and 30's either for or by ink companies. Whether it was internal or published is another matter.

[stevesurf]

There are actually numerous articles and studies that can be found with a sample search term:

 

fountain pen ink viscosity filetype:pdf

 

Here's a number of interesting links:

 

http://davidlu.net/Matt.pdf

http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0007/000729/072989eo.pdf

http://www.seas.harvard.edu/softmat/downloads/2011-23.pdf

http://www.nu-nanoscape.org/Vol2/13-Nocedal.pdf

http://mitgcm.org/~edhill/Tracer_work/papers/ejp4_2_020.pdf

[Intellidepth]

Search ink patents. They sometimes contain references. Even if they don't you'll find key words re ingredients related to those specific terms you mentioned above that you *can* locate references for. It will be an indirect method but depending on how you word the assignment could work exceptionally well. Also depends on your deadline and how much effort you want to put in to pull it all together .

 

Edit: there's also a guy on LinkedIn (whose details I can't recall) whose details came up when I was searching patents for viscosity details. (I was interested in Xanthan in particular). He was able to reverse engineer nearly 30 inks in an astonishing amount of time. He'd be a good person to pick the brain of re peer reviewed material.

Edited April 4, 2015 by Intellidepth

[SteveE]

Another place to search, and I'm not at all sure there is anything published, but look up the name Frank Dubiel. Frank was the author of "Da Book" which was one of the earlier fountain pen repair references. He wasn't really an author, but he was a fountain pen collector/repair man/total nut. His "day job" was managing some sort of a laboratory that specialized in dyes, and he occasionally came up with some comments on inks. He may have published some of his work in that area.

[vig2432]

Here is a PRL paper

Hydrodynamics of Writing with Ink--- Phys. Rev. Lett. 107, 264501, 2011

 

Also check this--http://www.explainthatstuff.com/how-fountain-pens-work.html

 

Tangential, but relevant for soft matter/nanotechnology--

Micromachined fountain pen for atomic force microscope-based nanopatterning

Appl. Phys. Lett. 85, 5361 (2004)

I suggest you to concentrate on pigment-based inks as they are colloids(relevant to soft matter). You can look at wetting and surface tension

 

Comparison of printer inks-http://scholarworks.wmich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1020&context=hilltopreview. This gives a rough idea of ink behaviour.

 

A general review of ink chemistry with good references-http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/Issues/2003/March/inkchemistry.asp

 

Check this out also-http://classroom.synonym.com/chemical-composition-pen-ink-17194.html,

https://archive.org/details/inkstheircomposi00mitcuoft

 

 

This is what i found. hope this is useful

Edited April 14, 2015 by vig2432

[torstar]

Hi,

 

maybe you will find this Ph.D.thesis useful. But the thesis is completely written in German.

http://elib.uni-stuttgart.de/opus/volltexte/2008/3602/pdf/Diss_Waibel.pdf

 

Regards, Ingolf.

 

P.S.: Pages 9-18 include a summary in English.

 

 

Thank you.

 

I can safely declare this one of the top 3 moments for 2015 that I'm grateful the FPN exists...

Edited April 14, 2015 by torstar