Chemistry · Chapter 11

Colloids, the Tyndall Effect and Emulsions

Particle size decides everything here. Grow the particles from a single ion up to a grain of silt and the mixture crosses from a solution to a colloid to a suspension.

The light bench one lamp, one tube

A light beam crossing a tube of mixture lamp

The emulsion bench oil in water

Oil droplets in water, with and without an emulsifier

Particle size

The slider runs on a ten-fold scale, from 0.3 nm up to 10 000 nm. A single water molecule is near 0.3 nm.

Jump to a real mixture

Live numbers

100nm across colloid

What the bench shows

size sets the behavior