Formation and growth of clusters in colloidal suspensions

TL;DR

This paper investigates the formation and growth of clusters in colloidal Al2O3 suspensions using advanced simulation techniques, providing new tools for analyzing microstructure development relevant to industrial ceramics.

Contribution

It introduces a parallel SRD-MD simulation framework with a novel cluster detection algorithm for studying clustered microstructures in colloidal suspensions.

Findings

Measured growth rates of clusters

Cluster size distributions

Validation of simulation methodology

Abstract

Depending on the pH value and salt concentration of Al2O3 suspensions different microstructures can form. Especially the clustered one is of major interest for industrial purposes as found in the production of ceramics. In this paper we investigate the clustered microstructure by means of a coupled Stochastic Rotation Dynamics (SRD) and Molecular Dynamics (MD) simulation. In order to gain statistics within a system containing numerous clusters, large simulation volumes are needed. We present our parallel implementation of the simulation algorithm as well as a newly developed cluster detection and tracking algorithm. We then show first results of measured growth rates and cluster size distributions to validate the applicability of our method.