Technical Notes
Units for interfacial tension (IFT)
Some older standards and technical publicationsuse dynes/cm for IFT units, and some labs apparently still use those units in their reports. Several years ago the use of CGS (centimeters-grams-seconds) units in science and engineering was deprecated. Since then, mN/m (millinewtons per meter) has been used for IFT, and that is what TOA3 and TOA4 use. Since numerically mN/m is equivalent to dynes/cm, no data conversion is necessary for switching to the newer units.
Beware that some labs and publications use N/m (newtons per meter) for IFT. The difference is easy to recognize - IFT values in mN/m are typically in the range 10-50, but the values are a thousandth as large (0.010-0.050) if they are expressed in N/m.