More on the microstructural characterization of dense particle gels

Characterization of structures of particles

“…Many techniques have been used for the characterization of the arrangement of the suspended particles in a suspension, often using only two-particle correlations. The most common is the pair-correlation function, g(r) [11][12][13][14][15][16], and related to that the fractal dimension [17,18]. The radial paircorrelation function is a powerful tool that quantifies the distribution of the inter-particle distances, which, however, give an accurate description only if the structure is homogeneous and spherically symmetric.…”

“…Another analysis technique is based on the gyration tensor [20,33], calculated for certain clusters of particles, as one can extract information about the size, shape [33], and main orientation [20] of the cluster. Particularly, for analyzing the arrangements of particles in colloidal gels, various other techniques have been employed, namely, the distributions of bond angle [13], angles in bonded triangles [13,32], length of straight paths [34], pore size [35], and the contact distributions [16].…”