Scaling of Membrane Phase Dynamics

Fig. 1. Representations of two types of membrane morphologies: the sponge (L3) and lamellar (Lα) phases with their corresponding characteristic lengths. From the equation, it is clear that transient birefringence, occurring at low shear rates, requires very dilute samples, i.e., having small φ. Furthermore, the φ/ηs dependence suggests that increasing solvent viscosity to slow membrane fluctuations would relax this requirement. Taking our lead from previous microemulsion work [2], we found that dextrose could be dissolved at volume fractions up to 40 % in the heavy brine solvent (0.2 mol of NaCl in D2O to make a 1 L solution) of cetylpyridinium chloride/hexanol membrane systems without altering their phase diagrams. The maximum dextrose addition changes ηs from 1.1 mPa·s to 13.6 mPa·s. Then for a series of sponge samples having membrane volume fractions from