Hard sphere interfacial tension

The entropically driven disorder-order transition in hard-sphere fluids was originally discovered in computer simulations [58, 59]. The development of colloidal suspensions behaving as hard spheres (i.e., having negligible Hamaker constants, see Section VI-3) provided the means to experimentally verify the transition. Experimental data on the nucleation of hard-sphere colloidal crystals [60] allows one to extract the hard-sphere solid-liquid interfacial tension, 7 = 0.55 0.02k T/o, where a is the hard-sphere diameter [61]. This value agrees well with that found from density functional theory, 7 = 0.6 0.02k r/a 2 [21] (Section IX-2A). 

In a dispersion of liquid droplets in flow, the transmission of tangential stress across the oil-water interface from the continuous phase to the dispersed phase causes liquid circulation in the droplets. Energy dissipation is therefore less than for hard spheres, and so the viscosity is lower than that given by eqn. (5.1). Under conditions where the interfacial tension is high enough to keep the droplets close to spherical, the intrinsic viscosity is given by ... 

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