Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Using Dissipative Particle Dynamics For Modeling Surfactants, Yuchen Zhang, Arezoo M. Ardekani

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Oil recovery is an industrial process that injects aqueous solutions into an oil reservoir to pump out crude oil and promote the oil production. The aqueous solution contains surfactants for reducing the interfacial tension (IFT) between aqueous phase and oil. The critical micelle concentration (CMC) is the concentration of surfactant above which micelles form and the interfacial tension reaches a plateau. Our research seeks to measure IFT and CMC for surfactants using dissipative particle dynamics (DPD) technique, which is a coarse-grained method based on the molecular dynamics. We first study how IFT is influenced by the surfactant concentration. Furthermore, another …