Tandemproject Dieter Bothe and Reinhard Miller

Project manager: Prof. Dr. Dieter Bothe (TU Darmstadt), Dr. habil. Reinhard Miller (MPI Golm)
Project team: M.Sc. Chiara Pesci (TU Darmstadt), Dr. Nina Kovalchuk (MPI Golm)

Summary:
Surfactants are essential ingredients in many technological processes such as foaming or emulsification. Due to their amphiphilic character they assemble at fluidic interfaces and modify the respective interfacial properties. Since these interfaces are moving and are continuously deformed and expanded, the local instantaneous interfacial tension is a most relevant parameter. In order to obtain a deeper quantitative understanding of such processes with soluble surfactant, our general objective is twofold: On the surface science side, we aim at a quantitative understanding of transport processes happening at liquid interfaces under dynamic conditions. This includes growing, oscillating and rising drops and bubbles in a liquid in the presence of surfactants. In many cases quantitative or semi-quantitative attempts for the description of such processes exist, however, reliable systematic data do not exist, and in all cases a rigorous theoretical description is missing. The target of this tandem project aims at filling this gap by performing adequate experiments with suitable tools available at the MPI in Potsdam, to describe the experimental data by simplified models (Potsdam group) and to compare and further develop the models and the quantitative understanding by a rigorous description of the corresponding situations (Darmstadt group).