Ostwald ripening

Ostwald ripening is the growth of larger particles or droplets at the expense of smaller ones, driven by differences in chemical potential and transport through a surrounding phase.

Gibbs–Thomson effect: A curved interface shifts a material’s equilibrium chemical potential or vapor pressure relative to a flat interface. Higher curvature raises small droplets’ chemical potential, favoring their dissolution.
Surface tension: The energetic cost per unit area of an interface between phases. Reducing total interfacial area provides the thermodynamic drive for coarsening.
Emulsion: A mixture of droplets of one liquid dispersed in another immiscible liquid. Ostwald ripening can enlarge droplets and destabilize emulsions even without collisions.
Coalescence: The merging of two or more droplets or particles into a single larger one. Coalescence requires physical contact, unlike ripening’s transfer through the surrounding phase.
Chemical potential: A thermodynamic quantity measuring how a system’s free energy changes when particles are added. Material diffuses down chemical-potential gradients between droplets of different sizes.
Solubility: The equilibrium concentration of a substance dissolved in a specified medium under stated conditions. Curvature makes the equilibrium solubility around smaller droplets higher.
乳化剤: A substance that adsorbs at interfaces and can lower interfacial tension or inhibit droplet contact. Surfactants can alter interfacial driving forces and slow droplet growth.
Brownian coagulation: The aggregation of particles after random motion brings them into contact. It grows particle clusters by collision rather than by molecular diffusion between sizes.
Fick's laws of diffusion: Equations relating diffusive flux to concentration gradients and describing how concentrations evolve over time. Diffusion carries dissolved material from shrinking droplets toward growing ones.
Diffusion: The net movement of particles from regions of higher concentration toward lower concentration through random motion. It is the transport process that redistributes material among droplets.

Linked from 18 pages