Stiff and Flexible Water-Poor Microemulsions: Disconnected and Bicontinuous Microstructures, Their Phase Diagrams, and Scattering Properties

Microemulsions are stable dispersions of two immiscible fluids separated by a layer of surfactant, called the surfactant film (Eicke 1979; Chevalier and Zemb 1990; Wennerström and Lindman 1979). The ternary solutions called, for historical reasons, reverse micelles or swollen micelles correspond to water/oil (w/o) and oil/water (o/w) microemulsions. Rationale in terms of thermodynamics has been started with the early recognition by Winsor (1948) that four types of thermodynamical equilibria can be found. These four types were also found in a simple model for flexible interfaces by Andelman et al. (1987). Nearly a dozen structural models have been developed (Zemb et al. 1990).