Phase diagrams modified by interfacial penalties

The conventional forms of phase diagrams are constructed without consideration of interfacial energies and they represent an important tool for chemical engineers and metallurgists. If interfacial energies are taken into consideration, it is intuitively obvious that the regions of phase equilibria must become smaller, because there is a penalty on the formation of interfaces. We investigate this phenomenon qualitatively for a one-dimensional model, in which the phases occur as layers rather than droplets or bubbles. The modified phase diagrams are shown in Chapters 3 and 4