Breaking emulsions

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Droplet coalescence is the key to breaking emulsions, that is, separating oil from water. This process underpins the recovery of crude oil and the remediation of industrial and environmental waste-waters. Through a unique and novel experimental program that simultaneously tracks drop trajectories up to the millimetre scale and drop deformations in the nanometre scale, this project aims to fill a fundamental gap in our understanding of such coalescence events. A complete theoretical model of coalescence will result, forming a predictive framework for separating emulsions to recover pure oil and water, and laying the foundation for using compound drops to tune the optical properties of surface for speciality applications.