Bicontinuous phase separation Created 2026-09-28 Updated 2026-11-05
In bicontinuous phase separation, both fluid phases form interpenetrating connected domains. During late-stage coarsening their morphology is often statistically self-similar after lengths are divided by one characteristic domain size .
Assume late-stage bicontinuous phase separation has one characteristic domain size and statistically self-similar morphology. The dynamical scaling of binary-fluid coarsening then estimates
The interface has surface tension . Its curvature pressure is of order , so its coarse-grained gradient, equivalently the transverse part of , scales as . Diffusive composition transport is neglected because hydrodynamic advection controls the late stage, and are treated as constants.
The pressure cannot simply be discarded: in an incompressible flow it cancels the longitudinal part of the other forces and contains both capillary and dynamic contributions. Applying the divergence-free projection to the momentum equation eliminates while retaining a solenoidal force with the same scaling. Geometry, projection, signs, and correlations are absorbed into dimensionless order-one coefficients. The result is