OSTWALD RIPENING : A STOCHASTIC APPROACH

The phenomenon of Ostwald ripening is examined theoretically for precipitates in solution, crystallites on a substrate, and islands of insoluble surfactant molecules at the liquid–air interface. The classical theory of Ostwald ripening, developed by Lifshitz and Slyozhov and independently by Wagner, employs a continuum approach in which the size distribution is a continuous function of particle size and the conservation equation is formulated as in hydrodynamics with the particle growth rate serving as a velocity in size space. It was derived for the case in which the diffusion fields of the individual particles do not overlap and provides asymptotic expressions at large times for the two extreme cases of diffusion controlled and kinetic controlled growth. In this paper, the validity of this continuum (hydrodynamic) approach is examined using a more rigorous stochastic microscopic approach (MCE). A detailed comparison is made between the numerical and asymptotic results obtained using the Lifshitz, Slyozh...

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