Shear-Induced Isotropic-to-Lamellar Transition in a Lattice-Gas Model of Ternary Amphiphilic Fluids

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that a hydrodynamic lattice-gas model can simulate shear-induced isotropic-to-lamellar phase transitions in ternary amphiphilic fluids, bridging a gap between experimental observations and numerical modeling.

Contribution

The study introduces a lattice-gas model capable of numerically simulating shear-induced phase transitions in amphiphilic fluids, which was previously unachieved.

Findings

The model exhibits shear-induced isotropic-to-lamellar transition.

Simulation results align with experimental and theoretical predictions.

The approach enables future detailed studies of complex fluid behaviors.

Abstract

Although shear-induced isotropic-to-lamellar transitions in ternary systems of oil, water and surfactant have been observed experimentally and predicted theoretically by simple models for some time now, their numerical simulation has not been achieved so far. In this work we demonstrate that a recently introduced hydrodynamic lattice-gas model of amphiphilic fluids is well suited for this purpose: the two-dimensional version of this model does indeed exhibit a shear-induced isotropic-to-lamellar phase transition.