THEORY AND SIMULATION OF OSTWALD RIPENING

A theoretical approach to the Ostwald ripening of droplets is presented in dimension D greater-than-or-equal-to 2. A mean-field theory is constructed to incorporate screening effects in the competing many-droplet system. The mean-field equations are solved to infinite order in the volume fraction and provide analytic expressions for the coarsening rate, the time-dependent droplet-distribution function, and the time evolution of the total number of droplets. These results axe in good agreement with experiments in three dimensions and with a very large scale and extensive numerical study in both two and three dimensions presented in this paper. The numerical study also provides the time evolution of the structure factors, which scale with the only length scale, the average droplet radius.