Agglomeration in charged suspensions Original Research Article

The aim of our work is to understand agglomeration of charged powders suspended in nonpolar fluids. The concerted influence of electromagnetic, hydrodynamic, thermal and van der Waals forces as well as Brownian forces leads to complex agglomeration behavior which depends on several parameters, e.g., the ratios of charges, sizes, temperature and concentrations of the particles. The present theoretical investigation of the problem is based on molecular dynamics simulations. The surrounding liquid is not simulated explicitly. Instead, the long-range hydrodynamic interactions between the particles are taken into account in Stokeslet approximation. In order to simulate larger systems, we parallelized the numerical integration, using a hypersystolic algorithm.