A defoaming agent is a chemical additive that reduces the surface tension of a solution, to inhibite the foam formation.
A defoamer is generally insoluble in the foaming medium and must have some essential features: low viscosity, a facility to spread readily on foam surface. It has to have a certain affinity to the air-liquid surface to destabilize the foam bubbles surface to cause their rupture and the subsequent breakdown of the surface foam.
A defoamer is used to control or eliminate unwanted foam generation. This wide range of applications needs also pharmaceutical and food grade silicone defoamers, as foam is generated in several applications of these industrial branches.
Foam can damage industrial process plants, slowing run times and degrading the operations of the equipments: defoamers are used to reduce it, to preserve the quality of the final products and the performance of the equipments.
Many agents are commonly used for defoaming: some oils, silicones, certain alcohols, stearates and glycols.
Silicone and non silicone defoamers are used in many industrial batch processes including water treatment, textiles and leather industry, metal processing, detergents and cleaners, petroleum and chemical industry, paints and coatings production, pulp and paper production, agrochemicals.
Silicone is an ideal defoamer. It is liquid (with a wide viscosity range, has a low surface energy, and is clean. Enhance your chemical manufacturing processes like mixing, bottle filling, gas scrubbing, distillation, emulsion polymerization, filtration, and fermentation, using silicone defoamers as formulation and processing aids.
Silicone, also called polysiloxane, is generally any of a diverse class of fluids, resins, or elastomers based on polymerized siloxanes, substances whose molecules consist of chains made of alternating silicon andoxygen atoms. Their chemical inertness, resistance to water and oxidation, and stability at both high and low temperatures have led to a wide range of commercial and industrial applications. Silicone makes excellent lubricants and emulsions for water repellents to treat textiles, paper, and other materials, as well as hydraulic fluids. Silicone resins are used in protective coatings and electrically insulating varnishes and for laminating glass cloth.
Silicone is not to be confused with the chemical element silicon, a crystalline metalloid widely used in computers and other electronic equipment. Although silicones contain silicon atoms, they also include carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and perhaps other kinds of atoms as well, and have different physical and chemical properties than elemental silicon.
They were first characterized as polymers in 1927 by the English chemist Frederic Stanley Kipping, who pioneered in the chemistry of silicones, organic derivatives of silicon and coined the term "silicone".
Silicones are produced by many manufacturers of chemical agents and are not usually dangerous, but it is always better to observe the usual best practices to use and store chemicals: store in cool place and far from direct sunlight, keep away from eyes and skin.
