Modeling diffusion in colloidal suspensions by dynamical density functional theory using fundamental measure theory of hard spheres

Abstract

We study the dynamics of colloidal suspensions of hard spheres that are subject to Brownian motion in the overdamped limit. We obtain the time evolution of the self and distinct parts of the van Hove function by means of dynamical density functional theory (DDFT). The free energy model for the hard sphere fluid that we use is the very accurate White Bear II version of Rosenfeld's fundamental measure theory. However, in order to remove interactions within the self part of the van Hove function a non-trivial modification has to be applied to the free energy functional. We compare our theoretical results with data that we obtain from dynamical Monte Carlo simulations and find that the latter are well described by our approach even for colloid packing fractions as large as 40%.

References in corpus (3)

• Density functional theory for hard-sphere mixtures: the White-Bear version Mark II
• Non-equilibrium sedimentation of colloids on the particle scale
• The van Hove distribution function for Brownian hard spheres: dynamical test particle theory and computer simulations for bulk dynamics

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Dynamical density functional theory for dense suspensions of colloidal hard spheres
• Universality in Driven and Equilibrium Hard Sphere Liquid Dynamics
• Superadiabatic forces in the dynamics of the one-dimensional Gaussian core model
• Dynamic Decay and Superadiabatic Forces in the van Hove Dynamics of Bulk Hard Sphere Fluids