Enhancement in the diffusivity of Brownian spheroids in the presence of spheres.

Abstract

In the present paper, we have extended the simulation technique Brownian cluster dynamics (BCD) to analyze the dynamics of the binary mixture of hard ellipsoids and spheres. The shape dependent diffusional properties have been incorporated into BCD using Perrin's factor and compared with analytical results of a one-component ellipsoidal system. We have investigated pathways to enhance the diffusivity of spheroids in the binary mixture by manipulating the phase behavior of the system through varying the fraction of spheres in the binary mixture. We show that at low volume fraction the spherical particles have a higher diffusion coefficient than the ellipsoids due to the higher friction coefficient. However, at a higher volume fraction, we show that the diffusion coefficient of the ellipsoids increases irrespective of the aspect ratio due to the anisotropic shape.