This book contains the papers presented at a meeting sponsored by the Colloid and Interface Science Group of the Faraday Division, Royal Society of Chemistry, which was held at Wills Hall, University of Bristol from the 14th - 16th April 1997. The pur pose of the meeting, which was entitled Colloidal Dispersions, was to discuss the subject of concentrated colloidal systems including, dispersions, emulsions and powders, in order to emphasize recent advances in experimental and theoretical understanding of these systems and how these advances could be applied to practical utitisation in the wide range of industries which are involved with colloidal systems. The papers presented at the meeting were given by the principal participants in a 5 year project on Colloid Technology, which started on the 1st August 1992, and was funded by the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) of the U.K. and a consortium of industries which was composed of ICI, Schlumberger, Unilever and Zeneca. The academic centres involved were, the Universities of Bristol, Cambridge, Edinburgh and Imperial College, London. Each of the papers published in this volume formed the focus for a discussion on that topic so that each subject was discussed in so me depth by the participants. J ean Proctor and Meg Staff have been tremendously helpful as secretaries at Bristol and Cambridge respectively throughout the project. Also, their help with the various meetings and with the production of this volume was invaluable. We thank them most warmly for their very able assistance.

This book covers the physical side of colloidal science from the individual forces acting between particles smaller than a micrometer that are suspended in a liquid, through the resulting equilibrium and dynamic properties. A variety of internal forces both attractive and repulsive act in conjunction with Brownian motion and the balance between them all decides the phase behaviour. On top of this various external fields, such as gravity or electromagnetic fields, diffusion and non-Newtonian rheology produce complex effects, each of which is of important scientific and technological interest. The authors aim to impart a sound, quantitative understanding based on fundamental theory and experiments with well-characterised model systems. This broad grasp of the fundamentals lends insight and helps to develop the intuitive sense needed to isolate essential features of the technological problems and design critical experiments. The main prerequisites for understanding the book are basic fluid mechanics, statistical mechanics and electromagnetism, though self contained reviews of each subject are provided at appropriate points. Some facility with differential equations is also necessary. Exercises are included at the end of each chapter, making the work suitable as a textbook for graduate courses in chemical engineering or applied mathematics. It will also be useful as a reference for individuals in academia or industry undertaking research in colloid science.

Many fundamental issues in classical condensed matter physics can be addressed experimentally using systems of individually visible mesoscopic particles playing the role of “proxy atoms”. The interaction between such “atoms” is determined by the properties of the surrounding medium and/or by external tuning. The best-known examples of such experimental model systems are two different domains of soft matter — complex plasmas and colloidal dispersions.The major goal of this book — written by scientists representing both complex plasmas and colloidal dispersions — is to bring the two fields together. In the first part of the book the basic properties of the two systems are summarized, demonstrating huge conceptual and methodological overlap of the fields and emphasizing numerous cross-connections between them and their essential complementarity. This “introductory part” should serve to help each community in understanding the other field better. Simultaneously, this provides the necessary basis for the second part focused on particle-resolved studies of diverse generic phenomena in liquids and solids — all performed with complex plasmas and/or colloidal dispersions. The book is concluded with the discussion of critical open issues and fascinating perspectives of such interdisciplinary research.