Measurement of the skin layer in the drying process of a polymer solution.

When a polymer solution is dried in air, a polymer-concentrated region, called a "skin" layer, often appears near the surface. In this paper, an experimental method is proposed for detecting the initial process of the formation of the skin layer. An electric field is applied on the surface of polymer solutions by a wedge-type "electric field tweezers," and the dynamic response of the surface profile is measured by an optical lever technique. Our experiments and theory indicate that when a skin layer is formed, (i) the slow relaxation process appears in the time domain and (ii) the long-persisting dip region appears in the surface profile. A parameter to quantify the difference of the surface response is proposed in this paper.