Size Effects of Solvent Molecules on the Phase Behavior and Effective Interaction of Colloidal Systems with the Bridging Attraction

Published

September 12, 2016

Author(s)

Jie Chen, Xuewu Wang, Steven R. Kline, Yun Liu

Abstract

There is much research interest toward understanding the phase behavior of colloidal systems interacting with a bridging interaction, where the small solvent particles and large solute colloidal particles can be reversibly associated with each other. These systems show interesting phase behavior compared to more widely studied depletion attraction systems. Here, we use Baxter's two-component sticky hard sphere model with Percus-Yevick closure to solve the Ornstein-Zernike equation and study the size effect on colloidal systems with bridging attraction. The spinodal decomposition regions, percolation transition boundaries and bimodal regions are systematically investigated as a function of the relative size of small solvent and large solute colloidal particles as well as the attraction strength between small and large particles. In the phase space determined by the concentrations of small and large particles, the spinodal and binodal regions form isolated islands. The locations and shapes of the spinodal and binodal regions sensitively depends on the relative size of the small and large particles and the attraction strength between them. The percolation region shrinks by decreasing the size ration while the binodal region slightly expands with the decrease of the size ratio. Our results are very important to understand the phase behavior of bridging attraction colloidal systems, protein phase behavior, and colloidal gelation mechanisms.

Citation

Journal of Physics Condensed Matter

Volume

28

Pub Type

Journals

Download Paper

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Keywords

Sticky Hard Sphere, Bridging Attraction, Spinodal Decomposition, Percolation, Binodal Transition

Citation

Chen, J. , Wang, X. , Kline, S. and Liu, Y. (2016), Size Effects of Solvent Molecules on the Phase Behavior and Effective Interaction of Colloidal Systems with the Bridging Attraction, Journal of Physics Condensed Matter, [online], https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=920847 (Accessed December 4, 2024)