Kinetics of wetting of a compacted powder by aqueous solutions of surface active agents

Summary The capillary rise of aqueous solutions of anionic wetting agents into a compacted powder of an organic chromium complex is discussed on the basis of the Washburn-Rideal equation expanded to account for the porous structure parameters.At the porosity 1 —/6, corresponding to the loosest packing of monodisperse spheres the penetration rate is found to be mostly governed by the effective tensions operative at the moving three phase line of contact in case no deflocculation intervenes.

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Zusammenfassung Der Kapillaraufstieg wässeriger Lösungen anionischer Netzmittel in gepreßtem Pulver eines organischen Chrom-Komplexes wird durch die erweiterte Gleichung vonWashburn-Rideal wiedergegeben, in der die Parameter der porösen Struktur mit einbezogen werden.Bei der Porosität 1 —/6, die der lockersten Anordnung gleichförmiger Kugeln entspricht, wird die Eindringgeschwindigkeit meistens durch die an der sich bewegenden Dreiphasengrenze wirkenden Grenzflächenspannungen bestimmt, wenn keine Peptisation eintritt.

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Paper presented at the XII Intern. Congr. Fat Research, Milan, September 1974.     

Predicting the solubility of xenon in n-hexane and n-perfluorohexane: a simulation and theoretical study

The solubility of xenon in n-hexane and n-perfluorohexane has been studied using both molecular simulation and a version of the SAFT approach (SAFT-VR). The calculations were performed close to the saturation line of each solvent, between 200 K and 450 K, which exceeds the smaller temperature range where experimental data are available in the literature. Molecular dynamics simulations, associated with Widom's test particle insertion method, were used to calculate the residual chemical potential of xenon in n-hexane and n-perfluorohexane and the corresponding Henry's law coefficients. The simulation results overestimate the solubility of xenon in both solvents when simple geometric combining rules are used, but are in good agreement if a binary interaction parameter is included. With the SAFT-VR approach we are able to reproduce the experimental solubility for xenon in n-hexane, using simple Lorentz-Berthelot rules to describe the unlike interaction. In the case of n-perfluorohexane as a solvent, a binary interaction parameter was introduced, taken from previous work on (xe + C₂F₆) mixtures. Overall, good agreement is obtained between the simulation, theoretical and experimental data.     

Thermodynamics of Small Fermi Systems: Quantum Statistical Fluctuations

We investigate the probability distribution of the quantum fluctuations of thermodynamic functions of finite, ballistic, phase-coherent Fermi gases. Depending on the chaotic or integrable nature of the underlying classical dynamics, on the thermodynamic function considered, and on temperature, we find that the probability distributions are dominated either (i) by the local fluctuations of the single-particle spectrum on the scale of the mean level spacing, or (ii) by the long-range modulations of that spectrum produced by the short periodic orbits. In case (i) the probability distributions are computed using the appropriate local universality class, uncorrelated levels for integrable systems, and random matrix theory for chaotic ones. In case (ii) all the moments of the distributions can be explicitly computed in terms of periodic orbit theory and are system-dependent, nonuniversal, functions. The dependence on temperature and on number of particles of the fluctuations is explicitly computed in all cases, and the different relevant energy scales are displayed.     

An Exceptional Set in the Ergodic Theory of Markov Maps of the Interval

It is known that a Markov map T of the unit interval preservesa measure µ, say, equivalent to Lebesgue measure, andthat almost every point of the interval has a forward orbitunder T that is uniformly distributed with respect to µ.In the opposite direction the main result of this paper statesthat there is a set of points having Hausdorff dimension 1 whoseforward orbits are in a certain sense very far from being sodistributed. 1991 Mathematics Subject Classification: 58F08,28A80.