Designing morphology of separated phases in multicomponent liquid mixtures

TL;DR

This paper introduces a graph theory-based method to predict and engineer the morphology of coexisting phases in multicomponent liquid mixtures, which is vital for various industrial and biological applications.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach to determine and design phase morphologies by analyzing surface energies, addressing both forward prediction and inverse engineering problems.

Findings

Successfully predicts phase topology from surface energies.

Enumerates all possible morphologies for given conditions.

Provides a method to engineer surface energies for desired morphologies.

Abstract

Phase separation of multicomponent liquid mixtures plays an integral part in many processes ranging from industry to cellular biology. In many cases the morphology of coexisting phases is crucially linked to the function of the separated mixture, yet it is unclear what determines morphology when multiple phases are present. We developed a graph theory approach to predict the topology of coexisting phases from a given set of surface energies (forward problem), enumerate all topologically distinct morphologies, and reverse engineer conditions for surface energies that produce the target morphology (inverse problem).