It Swelled, It Did Not Dissolve: One Assumption That Ends Batches
Crosslinked polyacrylate is insoluble by design. What happens when a mixer treats it as a thickener, how to tell the two apart, and how to rescue a gelled batch.
Powder Floating on Top: A Fault-Finding Order for No-Gel Batches
You add the powder, stir for a minute, and it is still there – a raft of dry granules riding on the surface, some of them clumped into balls with dry cores. Ten minutes later the water is cloudy and slightly thicker, but nothing has gelled. The instinct is to blame the powder, and sometimes th…
