Fig. 5.

Additional energy for fragmentation of an oil droplet of arbitrary size relative to the surface energy of the original oil droplet as a function of the number of fragments N and the fraction of the droplet’s surface that is in contact with the rock, f. The additional energy required for fragmentation is less than 5 times the original surface energy, which indicates that droplet fragmentation can occur for relatively small changes in interfacial energy that are consistent with the fluid properties used in the experiments.