Spatial scale invariance represents a remarkable feature of natural phenomena. A ubiquitous example is represented by miscible liquid phases undergoing diffusion. Theory and simulations predict that in the absence of gravity diffusion is characterized by long-ranged algebraic correlations. Experimental evidence of scale invariance generated by diffusion has been limited, because on Earth the development of long-range correlations is suppressed by gravity. Here we report experimental results obtained in microgravity during the flight of the FOTON M3 satellite. We find that during a diffusion process a dilute polymer solution exhibits scale-invariant concentration fluctuations with sizes ranging up to millimetres, and relaxation times as large as 1,000 s. The scale invariance is limited only by the finite size of the sample, in agreement with recent theoretical predictions. The presence of such fluctuations could possibly impact the growth of materials in microgravity.

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A fluctuating hydrodynamics approach is presented for the calculation of the structure factor for timedependent nonequilibrium diffusive processes in binary liquid mixtures. The hydrodynamic equations are linearized around the time-dependent macroscopic state given by the usual phenomenological diffusion equation. The cases of free diffusion, thermal diffusion, and barodiffusion are considered in detail. The results are used to describe the low-angle scattered intensity distributions from the time-dependent concentration profiles during the approach to steady state. The theoretical predictions are found to be in agreement with experimental data from thermal diffusion and free diffusion experiments. It is shown that in general the presence of nonequilibrium concentration fluctuations yields a substantial increase in the static structure factor over the equilibrium value, at least for the cases of free diffusion and thermal diffusion. As in the case of nonequilibrium fluctuations at steady state, the static structure factor displays a fast k Ϫ4 divergence at larger wave vectors k, and saturation to a constant value for k smaller than a critical wave vector k RO. It is also shown that the static structure factor from a sedimenting mixture is actually temporarily lowered below the equilibrium value for k smaller than k RO. As the steady state is approached, the structure factor loses any k dependence and it attains the equilibrium value. ͓S1063-651X͑98͒14910-3͔

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Scientific papers on ozone decay kinetics in water report very wide variations, depending on a multiplicity of factors, such as ozone concentration, pH, temperature, alkalinity, fluid-dynamic conditions, presence of UV radiations, concentration of organic and inorganic carbon. This paper has been intended as an engineering-oriented review which collects and compares the main results reported in the recent literature so that the condensed information can guide the reader in getting operational indications for both applications and research

Recent experimental and theoretical works have shown that giant fluctuations are present during diffusion in liquid systems. We use linearized fluctuating hydrodynamics to calculate the net mass transfer due to these nonequilibrium fluctuations. Remarkably, the mass flow turns out to coincide with the usual Fick's one. The renormalization of the hydrodynamic equations allows us to quantify the gravitational modifications of the diffusion coefficient induced by the gravitational stabilization of long wavelength fluctuations.

We show that the two point intensity correlation in the near field of the scattered light is directly related to the two point density correlation g(r). Preliminary measurements on two sets of calibrated random pinholes of 140 and 300 &mgr;m diameters, and on aqueous solutions of latex spheres of 5, 10, and 40 &mgr;m are reported. A discussion on the desirability of the technique as a simple and powerful alternative to low angle scattering will be presented.

We used a form of schlieren interferometry to measure the mean-squared amplitude and temporal autocorrelation function of concentration fluctuations driven by the presence of a gradient during the free diffusion of a urea solution into water. By taking and processing sequences of images separated in time by less than the shortest correlation time of interest, we were able to simultaneously measure dynamics at a number of different wave vectors. The technique is conceptually similar to the shadowgraph method, which has been used to make similar measurements, but the schlieren method has the advantage that the transfer function is wave-vector independent rather than oscillatory.