Due to depletion interactions, a few of colloidal spheres will be packed into cluster or clusters, even a phase transition may take place if the volume fraction of system is large enough. In a binary colloidal system,...Due to depletion interactions, a few of colloidal spheres will be packed into cluster or clusters, even a phase transition may take place if the volume fraction of system is large enough. In a binary colloidal system, if the mole fraction of one component is very small, then it can be taken as the impurity of the other component. In this work, the effect of impurity on critical conditions of colloidal cluster nucleation was studied by Carnahan-Starling state equation and the principle of entropy maximum. The results show that, even the mole fraction of small-spheres is very small, the critical volume fraction is obvious smaller than that of one component system, so the influence on critical volume fraction from impurity is very huge and cannot be ignored. In addition, it is also found that, the larger the volume fraction of the system is, the larger cluster density can be packed, however, the critical size of nucleating cluster is almost independent of the density of the cluster.展开更多
文摘Due to depletion interactions, a few of colloidal spheres will be packed into cluster or clusters, even a phase transition may take place if the volume fraction of system is large enough. In a binary colloidal system, if the mole fraction of one component is very small, then it can be taken as the impurity of the other component. In this work, the effect of impurity on critical conditions of colloidal cluster nucleation was studied by Carnahan-Starling state equation and the principle of entropy maximum. The results show that, even the mole fraction of small-spheres is very small, the critical volume fraction is obvious smaller than that of one component system, so the influence on critical volume fraction from impurity is very huge and cannot be ignored. In addition, it is also found that, the larger the volume fraction of the system is, the larger cluster density can be packed, however, the critical size of nucleating cluster is almost independent of the density of the cluster.
