Surface tension of spherical drops from surface of tension

J Chem Phys. 2014 Jan 21;140(3):034110. doi: 10.1063/1.4862149.

Abstract

The determination of surface tension of curved interfaces is a topic that raised many controversies during the last century. Explicit liquid-vapor interface modelling (ELVI) was unable up to now to reproduce interfacial behaviors in drops due to ambiguities in the mechanical definition of the surface tension. In this work, we propose a thermodynamic approach based on the location of surface of tension and its use in the Laplace equation to extract the surface tension of spherical interfaces from ELVI modelling.