Lemohang Mathaba and Itumeleng Moiloa, two students from the National University of Lesotho (NUL), had a cool challenge: take a dishwashing soap made right here at NUL and see if it’s as good as the big South African brands.
The soap is called Supersuds. It’s made by a small company called ChemConsult, which works right out of the NUL Innovation Hub. It’s affordable, eco-friendly, and made using ideas cooked up in NUL labs. But still, the big question was—can it actually compete with the fancy stuff in stores?
To find out, the two students stepped into the lab and got to work.
They started with something simple: testing the pH of the soaps. That just means they wanted to know how strong or gentle each soap was. A good dish soap needs to be strong enough to clean greasy dishes, but not so strong it burns your hands. Turns out, Supersuds had just the right balance. Strong but still kind to your skin. Nice.
Next, they checked how much foam the soaps made—because let’s be honest, if it doesn’t bubble, it doesn’t feel like it’s cleaning. They poured the soap into a tall cylinder to see how high the foam rose (that’s called foam height), then watched how long it lasted before it started popping (that’s foam stability). Supersuds made some tall foam, and it didn’t disappear too quickly either. So far, so good.
Now here comes the real science stuff—something called Critical Micelle Concentration, or just CMC.
This is where things get interesting. Soap molecules are like little creatures with two sides: one side loves water, the other loves grease. At first, they float around separately. But once there’s enough of them, they start grouping up into tiny balls called micelles. These micelles are the real grease fighters.
The point when the soap starts forming these micelles? That’s the CMC. And here’s the deal: the lower the CMC, the better. It means your soap can start working its magic with just a small amount. More cleaning power, less waste.
So how did the students figure this out? With a smart little trick—conductivity.
They added more and more soap to water and measured how well electricity flowed through it. When the soap molecules were still floating alone, electricity zoomed through. But when the micelles formed, things changed, and the flow slowed down. They plotted all that on a graph, and bam—the spot where the line changed gave them the CMC.
They tested different soap ingredients like TEA, CAPB, SLES, and Sulphonic Acid. Then they tried a mix of them all—just like what’s in Supersuds. And guess what? The mix had the lowest CMC. That means Supersuds starts working faster than soaps made with just one type of surfactant. Pretty clever.
And they didn’t stop there. They used something called a Levey-Jenning chart—a fancy graph that helps you see if a product is being made the same way every time. If the dots on the graph stay close to the middle line, it means everything’s going smoothly. That’s exactly what they saw for Supersuds. It wasn’t jumping all over the place. It was reliable. Consistent. Solid.
By the time they wrapped things up, the answer was pretty clear.
Supersuds, the home-grown soap from Roma, wasn’t just holding its own—it was going toe-to-toe with the big brands. It cleaned just as well. It foamed just as nicely. And thanks to that low CMC, it probably saves you a bit of money too.,
And hey—who knew washing dishes could be this cool?
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Brought to you by NUL Innovation Hub, Where Academia Meets Industry
