Journal of Physical Studies 2(4), 496–503 (1998) DOI: https://doi.org/10.30970/jps.02.496 DEPLETION FORCES IN COLLOIDAL SUSPENSIONS

D. Henderson¹, S. Sokolowski², D. Wasan^3
1Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Brigham Young University, Provo UT 84602, USA
²Department for the Modelling of Physico–Chemical Properties, Marie Curie–Sklodowska University, 20031 Lublin, Poland
³Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago IL 60616, USA

The classical theory for the interactions between colloidal particles is the DLVO theory in which the interaction is presumed to consist of a repulsive long range electrostatic term and an attractive short range dispersion term. One important missing term is the effect of the depletion force (known in the statistical mechanics community as the volume exclusion force). An approximate description of this term was obtained by Henderson and Lozada Cassou (HCL) from the theory of hard sphere mixtures. There has been some controversy about the manner in which this term was obtained. Some aspects of this question are discussed and an account of some recent work that has settled this controversy and that justifies the original result of HLC are reviewed.

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