Publisher's Synopsis
Colloids are all around us and we interact with them constantly whether through exciting new technological areas such as nanotechnology, complex fluids and soft matter technology, or even more mundane systems such as foods, coatings or cleaning agents. This text is both an introduction to the field and a bridge to the more specialist texts that are available, and includes recent ideas that have been developed on the interactions between particles and the concentrated state. Many workers coming to the field of colloids for the first time find the current advances too daunting for them to attempt to apply the ideas to their systems.;By the nature of the subject, some areas are necessarily complex, but when this occurs this text includes a calculation strategy so that the reader can judge the depth required for the application under study. Many commercial systems are complex mixtures but in most cases the basic rules apply and surprises only occur when there is a quite specific interaction present. Hence, using this text, the user will always have the fundamentals readily to hand. This book summarises such fundamentals in an accessible fashion and is relevant for undergraduate cour ses on chemistry, chemical engineering, physics, material science or pharmaceutics.
