Influence of surfactants on the structure of titanium oxide gels : experiments and simulations

Abstract

We report here on experimental and numerical studies of the influence of surfactants on mineral gel synthesis. The modification of the gel structure when the ratios water-precursor and water-surfactant vary is brought to the fore by fractal dimension measures. A property of {\em polydispersity of the initial hydrolysis} is proposed to explain these results, and is successfuly tested through numerical experiments of three dimensional chemically limited aggregation.Comment: 12 pages, 4 Postscript figures, uses RevTe