Binary Coalescence of Mercury Drops

Abstract

Binary coalescence of mercury drops in aqueous surfactant solutions in presence and in absence of inorganic salt was studied in this work. Sodium dodecyl sulfate, sodium dodecyl benzene sulfonate and bovine serum albumin were used as the surfactants. Sodium bromide was used as the inorganic electrolyte. With increase in surfactant concentration, coalescence time was found to increase. Coalescence time also increased with increase in salt concentration in presence of the surfactants. Stochastic distributions of coalescence time were observed in all experiments. A stochastic model of coalescence, which was developed earlier by us, was used to fit the distributions. The model fitted the coalescence time distributions well. The significance of the variation of the model parameters (i.e., dimensionless coalescence threshold and normalized standard deviation) with the physical properties of the systems was analyzed. This study exemplifies the stochastic nature of coalescence of drops of a liquid of very high density and surface tension in which case the drainage of the thin liquid film trapped between the drops is expected to be practically instantaneous.
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