Silicone defoamer is a white viscous emulsion. It has been used in various industrial fields since the 1960s, but the large-scale and comprehensive rapid development began in the 1980s. As an organosilicon defoamer, its application field is also very wide, more and more attention from all walks of life. Silicone defoamer is an indispensable assistant in the chemical industry, papermaking, coating, food, textile and pharmaceutical industries. It can not only remove froth on the liquid surface of the process medium, but also improve the separation, gasification, drainage and other effects of filtration, washing, extraction, distillation, evaporation, dehydration, drying, and so on, and ensure that all kinds of materials are flourishing. The capacity of containers for loading and handling.

After the defoamer product was adopted, people soon found that because of the addition of defoamer, the operation efficiency and quality of manufacturing enterprises have been greatly improved than before. In recent years, more and more silicone defoamers have been widely used in all walks of life.

Bubble is a common phenomenon in our life, but a large number of bubbles form and form foam when they are continuously distributed in liquid. A large number of bubbles exist in life and production, not only affect the normal work, but also cause some pollution to the environment, so eliminating foam is a very necessary job. Usually, in order to achieve defoaming quickly, most enterprises will add defoamers to defoam, but there are many kinds of defoamers, so I will take silicone defoamers as an example to introduce the defoaming process and principle of silicone defoamers.


Silicone has a low surface tension. When the defoamer made of silicone is added to the foaming system, it can disperse rapidly. The surfactant molecules are aligned on the bubble surface. When the silicone defoamer reaches a certain concentration and the surfactant molecules are enough, a layer of film will be formed on the bubble wall, and the surface tension will be reduced, thus increasing. The gas-liquid contact surface finally makes the formed bubbles not easy to merge and burst.


Because the bubble film exposed to air has a bilayer membrane structure, to eliminate foam, it is necessary to destroy and inhibit the formation of gas-liquid film. Therefore, the added silicone defoamer must be able to spread quickly on the surface of the solution and enter the bimolecular oriented film of foam, which destroys the mechanical balance of the membrane, thereby achieving the purpose of defoaming.


For general organic compounds, their spreading coefficient is very small and their chemical properties are inert, so pure silicone oil can not be used as defoamer, but after emulsifying it to form silicone defoamer, it can spread quickly on the surface of the solution, and many good defoaming effects can be achieved with less amount. (Source: Silicone Innovation Institute)