Binary Coalescence of Water Drops in Organic Media in Presence of Ionic Surfactants and Salts

Binary coalescence of water drops in o‐xylene and toluene, and ethylene glycol drops in toluene were studied in this work. The effects of cationic and anionic surfactants on coalescence time were studied. Cetyl trimethyl ammonium bromide (CTAB) and cetyl pyridinium bromide (CPyBr) were used as cationic surfactants. Sodium dodecyl benzene sulfonate (SDBS) was used as the anionic surfactant. The effects of salts (NaCl and CaCl₂) containing monovalent and divalent ions on coalescence were investigated. The coalescence time was found to follow distributions in each of these experiments. The minimum and maximum values of the distributions were largely different. The stochastic model developed earlier by us was used to fit the distributions. The effects of the physical properties of the system (such as density, size of the drops, interfacial tension, and surface excess of adsorbed surfactant) on the model parameters were discussed.

Keywords:

• Binary coalescence
• drop
• distribution of coalescence time
• surfactant
• salt effect

The work was supported by a grant from DST, Government of India.