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Details of Grant 

EPSRC Reference: GR/L51997/02
Title: COLLOIDAL PARTICLES AT FLUID INTERFACES
Principal Investigator: quirke, Professor N
Other Investigators:
Researcher Co-Investigators:
Project Partners:
Department: Chemistry
Organisation: Imperial College London
Scheme: Standard Research (Pre-FEC)
Starts: 01 October 1998 Ends: 13 May 1999 Value (£): 50,380
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:
Complex fluids & soft solids
EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications:
No relevance to Underpinning Sectors
Related Grants:
Panel History:  
Summary on Grant Application Form
Particles at fluid/fluid interfaces have both academic and industrial importance. The wettability of a particle at an interface determines the strength of attachment to the interface. Wettabilities can be crucially affected by the existence of a line tension (?) in the fluid/fluid/solid contact line around the particle, particularly if (?) is high and/or the particle is small. Few experimental values for such line tensions are available in the literature and those that do exist are widely disparate. The project, which is a melding of modelling, theory and experiment, is intended to provide both theoretical and experimental line tensions for colloidal and larger particles resting at fluid/fluid interfaces. Experimental line tensions will be determined using a film balance technique recently devised by us. We have shown that the contact angle of a liquid surface with a spherical particle does not change continuously to 0 or 180 degrees as ? is increased but that a wetting/drying transition occurs. The existence of such transitions will be investigated both experimentally and by computer modelling. Of particular interest will be systems where the particles reach diameters a few times that of molecules of the supporting liquid, where the simple concept of a contact line becomes ill-defined.
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Organisation Website: http://www.imperial.ac.uk