Abstract
Cylindrical or rod-like particles are promising materials for the applications of fillers in nanocomposite materials and additives to control rheological properties of colloidal suspensions. Recent advances in particle synthesis allows for cylinders to be manufactured with short-ranged attractions to study the gelation as a function of packing fraction, aspect ratio and attraction strength. In order to aid in the analysis of small-angle scattering experiments of rod-like particles, computer simulation methods were used to model these particles with specialized Monte Carlo algorithms and tabular superquadric potentials. The attractive interaction between neighboring rods increases with the amount of locally-accessible surface area, thus leading to patchy-like interactions. We characterize the clustering and percolation of cylinders as the attractive interaction increases from the homogenous fluid at relatively low attraction strength, for a variety of aspect ratios and packing fractions. Comparisons with the experimental scattering results are also presented, which are in agreement.
Highlights
Anisotropic shapes are ubiquitous in nature, often conferring unique adaptations over more symmetric counterparts
The study of athermal, hard rods has been the subject of great interest because the anisotropic shape of the rods can lead to orientational ordering transitions on the basis of entropy alone due to its transfer between rotational and translational modes.[12,13,14]
We study the clustering and percolation as a function of aspect ratio, packing fraction and attraction strength
Summary
Anisotropic shapes are ubiquitous in nature, often conferring unique adaptations over more symmetric counterparts. The surfaces of superquadric solids may be described analytically, which has been exploited in the past to study a subset of convex superquadrics known as superballs that can smoothly interpolate from a cube to a sphere and an octahedron.[45,46,47] The addition of short-ranged attractions due to depletion has been investigated recently.[48] Superquadric shapes have been simulated as hard rigid bodies[49] and with attractive patches.[50] analytical solutions for the interaction potential between convex superquadric shapes and a planar wall under the influence of depletion have been investigated.[51] In this computational work, we study cylinders with an attraction range that is approximately 4% of the cylinder diameter, which have been the focus of recent experimental studies.[43,52] these systems represent an opportunity to compare experiment and simulation.
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