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Effects of Interparticle Attractions on Colloidal Sedimentation

Source: Phys. Rev. Lett. 104, 068301 (2010); doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.104.068301

Published 11 February 2010

PACS
  • 82.70.Dd
    Colloids
  • 05.40.-a
    Fluctuation phenomena, random processes, noise, and Brownian motion
  • 47.11.-j
    Computational methods in fluid dynamics
  • YEAR: 2010
PUBLICATION DATA
ISSN:
1553-9628 (online)
Publisher:
AIP is a member of CrossRef APS
A. Moncho-Jordá,1 A. A. Louis,2 and J. T. Padding3
1Departamento de Física Aplicada, Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad de Granada, Campus Fuentenueva S/N, 18071 Granada, Spain
2Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics, University of Oxford, 1 Keble Road, Oxford OX1 3NP, United Kingdom
3Computational Biophysics, University of Twente, P.O. Box 217, 7500 AE, Enschede, The Netherlands
We use a mesoscopic simulation technique to study the effect of short-ranged interparticle attractions on the steady-state sedimentation of colloidal suspensions. Attractions increase the average sedimentation velocity vs compared to the pure hard-sphere case, and for strong enough attractions, a nonmonotonic dependence on the packing fraction phi with a maximum velocity at intermediate phi is observed. Attractions also strongly enhance hydrodynamic velocity fluctuations, which show a pronounced maximum size as a function of phi. These phenomena arise from a complex interplay between nonequilibrium hydrodynamic effects and the thermodynamics of transient cluster formation. ©2010 The American Physical Society
History: Received 15 June 2009; published 11 February 2010
Permalink: http://link.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v104/e068301
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