ABSTRACT
In particle-based simulation methods, an appropriate treatment to prevent the overlap of solid particles or to evaluate the repulsive forces or energies between the soft layers covering particles, is very important, in order to avoid an instability of a system resulting from a physically unreasonable particle overlap. In development of a particle-based simulation code for non-spherical particle suspensions, one of the more diffi cult tasks is to treat particle overlap and evaluate the minimum distance between two dispersed particles. Hence, before tackling development of a simulation code, it is required to conduct a systematic analysis in regard to the particle overlap or the minimum distance between particles. This analytical assessment of the particle overlap leads to a successful implementation in computer language. Moreover, knowledge of the minimum distance between two particles that is obtained from the assessment procedure, is indispensable for evaluating the cluster size distribution of the aggregate structures of dispersed particles. In the present and following sections, therefore, we analyze the criterion of the particle overlap for two nonspherical particles such as spherocylinder, disk-like and cube-like particles. The overlap criterion for two spherical particles is straightforwardly expressed using the center-to-center distance, hence, in the present section we begin with a discussion concerning spheroidal particles [1, 2].
