Graduation Year

Spring 2013

Document Type

Open Access Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Science

Department

Mathematics

Second Department

Physics

Reader 1

Rachel Levy

Reader 2

Darryl Yong

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Terms of Use for work posted in Scholarship@Claremont.

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© 2014 Shreyas Kumar

Abstract

This thesis is intended to fulfill the requirements of the Math and Physics departments at Harvey Mudd College. We begin with a brief introduction to the study of surfactant dynamics followed by some background on the experimental framework our work is related to. We then go through a derivation of the model we use, and explore in depth the nature of the Equation of State (EoS), the relationship between the surface tension on a fluid and the surfactant concentration. We consider the effect of using an empirical equation of state on the results of the simulations and compare the new results against the results produced using a multilayer (EoS) as well as experimental observations. We find that the empirical EoS leads to two new behaviors - preserving of large gradients of surfactant concentration and the occurrence of dynamics in distinct regimes. These behaviors suggest that the empirical EoS improves the agreement of the model’s prediction with experiment.

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