Watching paint dry sounds like the
most boring job in the world. But it’s actually a lot more fascinating
than you’d think. For the past four years, Dr. Thomas Curwen has been
working for the international paint company Dulux, watching paint dry.
And the kind of stuff he looks at on a daily basis is really quite
mind-blowing.
34-year-old Curwen is a research
scientist from Twyford, Berkshire. His full time job involves carefully
observing the changing colors and particles of paint as it dries – both
on walls as well as under a microscope. It’s a pretty important job,
because it ensures that the paints are durable and do not fall off at
the slightest touch.
“At Dulux, we’re passionate about
delivering high quality paint to our consumers,” he said. And that means
we spend a lot of time using microscopes to watch paint dry, so that we
can develop a better understanding of how to form the most durable
films.” What Curwen essentially does is combine a fundamental
understanding of paint film formation along with polymer technology to
deliver paint films with excellent durability, as if they’re protected
by an invisible barrier.
“Just imagine how drab our lives would be without vibrant
color,” Curwen pointed out. “Ensuring paints are the brightest and most
durable they can help make people happier in their houses, offices or
just out and about. I ensure we have always have the best product and –
although it seems insignificant – paint plays a major role in affecting
our emotions.”
“When I tell people what I do, they take the mickey out of
me,” Curwen said. “I’m always getting told, ‘That must be the most
boring job in the world.’ People think I stare at walls, constantly
checking my watch to time how long it takes – if that was the case I
would be bored out of my mind.”
In reality, the particles of paint come alive under Curwen’s watchful
gaze. All the interesting processes happening on a microscopic scale
are revealed to him, and he’s lost in a seemingly miraculous world. “You
see so much rich detail when you zoom in, when you get really close the
pictures can look like something from out of space.” Some people think
his job is easy, but that’s not true either. “It can be really
straining,” he said.
Curwen explained that a liter of
paint consists of a million billion tiny particles, which is more than
the number of stars in the Milky Way. Some of the largest particles have
similar dimensions to the human hair, while others are about a hundred
times smaller. “To understand how quickly and well the paints dry, we
have to magnify the images as much as 25,000 times.”
“If we dilute a sample of paint
under water and put a drop under the light microscope, we get a real
sense of the chaotic nature of the system. We can see the unimaginably
large number of particles of all different shapes and sizes as they’re
buffeted around by a range of competing forces,” said Curwen.
As the film dries, and the water
evaporates, Curwen says that it loses about half of its volume. To form a
durable film, a thorough understanding is required of how the pigment
particles are packed as the water evaporates. If the process isn’t
understood properly, the stresses that can develop in the film could
leave it weak or even tear it apart as it dries. Curwen also uses an
electron microscope to observe in greater detail how the different
particles pack around one another, and how the invisible glue – the
polymer – holds the particles in the paint film together.
A series of three images help Curwen study the paint film
at different magnifications. The first one – about 100 times
magnification – gives a rough sense of the cross section of the film.
The next one – zoomed in 5,000 times – gives a much better idea of the
range of different sized particles that are packed together to form the
film. The final image – zoomed in to 25,000 times – reveals the
particles as well as the thin layer of polymer that binds the particles
together.
According to Curwen, the role that paint plays in our lives is more
important than we realize. In fact, when he moved into his new house a
few months ago, the first thing he did was paint it. “We just had to get
rid of that old wallpaper – it was dreadful!” he said.
