Precipitation pattern formation Available to Purchase

Precipitation patterns have been observed in initially uniform salt solutions. They cannot be explained by Ostwald’s supersaturation mechanism, which requires concentration gradients. A theory of them is presented based on the Cahn–Hillard equation for the salt concentration c. It shows that there is a range of initial concentrations which give rise to periodic precipitation patterns provided that the diffusion coefficient D(c) is negative for some range of c.