EPJ E Review - Making sense of particles at fluid interfaces

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Published on 31 August 2018

In this EPJ E Topical Review, Armando Maestro and colleagues unravel the physico-chemical bases underlying the attachment of particles to fluid interfaces. Their focus is on the relaxation mechanisms involved in the equilibration of particle-laden interfaces.

Particle-laden interfaces play a key role in many systems that are used in industrial and technological applications, such as the stabilization of foams, emulsions, or thin films, flotation processes, encapsulation, pharmaceutical formulations, food technology and catalysis.

A big challenge for researchers in this field is finding a framework to describe the complex interplay between different physico-chemical properties, e.g. particle wettability, size, shape, surface charge, and chemical nature of the particles and the interface, with the relative dielectric constant of the phases playing a major role.

This Review article is part of the EPJ E Topical Issue on Flowing Matter, Problems and Applications: https://epje.epj.org/component/toc/?task=topic&id=888