ON A RANDOM APPROACH TO OSTWALD RIPENING

摘要

Today, most models on Ostwald ripening rely upon the ideas of Lifshitz, Slyosov and Wagner first presented some forty years ago. In their model in its simplest binary formulation, the Gibbs-Thomson relation makes the concentration of the elements different close to small particles compared with close to larger ones, which in turn causes diffusion through the matrix causing small particles to shrink and large ones to grow. Instead of the actual solution of the diffusion problem, which is unknown, the stationary part of the diffusion equation is used to estimate the flux in the medium. In this paper, we replace these static fields with random walkers to model transport of matter in the matrix. The model itself, its results and its relation to the LSW theory are discussed.