Abstract
Measuring the concentration profiles induced by gravity settling is known to be an efficientroute to obtain the equation of state of a colloidal suspension, to inspect the fine details ofthe phase diagram and to provide clues on the nature of metastable phases. Here weshow that a careful analysis of the transient settling profiles may add valuableinformation for what concerns colloidal hydrodynamics. In particular, we showthat a numerical inversion of a kinetic profile yields the full hydrodynamic factorK(Φ) up to the concentration of the original unsettled suspension, and that thedilute part of the profile yields a ‘dynamic’ gravitation length also related toK(Φ). These predictions are tested on a suspension of monodisperse hard and sticky spheres.Finally we describe and test a novel optical method, allowing us to measure sedimentationprofiles on a wide class of colloidal systems, even in the presence of a noticeableturbidity.
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