Session MB - Drops I. Emulsions & Drops.
MIXED session, Tuesday afternoon, November 23
Grand II, Westin Seattle
In strongly sheared emulsions, experiments (Galloway and Macosko 2002) have shown that systems consisting of one continuous (matrix) and one dispersed (drops) phase may undergo a coalescence cascade leading to a system in which both phases are continuous, (sponge-like). Such configurations may have desirable mechanical and electrical properties and thus have wide ranging applications.
Using a new and improved diffuse-inteface method (accurate surface tension force formulation, volume-preservation, and efficient nonlinear multigrid solver) developed by Kim and Lowengrub 2004, we perform numerical simulations of cocontinuous blends and determine the conditions for formation. We also characterize their rheology.