Statistical thermodynamics of phase equilibria in microemulsions

Abstract

The statistical thermodynamics of microemulsions is investigated on the basis of a model which represents microemulsion structure as a random geometry of interspersed oil and water domains generated by a Voronoi tesselation, with the surfactant adsorbed at the boundary. The resulting one-parameter free energy function predicts two- and three-phase equilibria bearing a strong resemblance to experimental observations on certain alkyl aryl sulfonate–oil–brine microemulsion systems.