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Published on: May 20, 2014
Effective interactions in polydisperse colloidal suspensions investigated using Ornstein-Zernike integral equations
1Department for the Modeling of Physico-Chemical Processes, Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, 20-031 Lublin, Poland. pawel.bryk@gmail.com
Abstract:
We present a mean of calculating the effective interactions in polydisperse colloidal suspension from liquid state integral equation theory. The method is based on Lado's expansion of correlation functions in a suitable set of orthogonal polynomials. The outlined approach is subsequently used to investigate the effects of polydispersity on the effective potentials for model systems with attractive and repulsive bare interactions. The dominant effect of polydispersity of the smaller species is to weaken the effective potentials between big colloidal particles. This can be exploited as another way of tuning the interactions in colloidal suspensions to match the desired properties.
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