Anisotropic media electrostatic interactions

Within the dielectric continuum model, the electrostatic interactions between a probe and the surrounding molecules are described in terms of the interaction between the charges contained in the molecular cavity, and the electrostatic potential these changes experience, as a result of the polarization of the environment (the so-called reaction field). A simple expression is obtained for the case of an electric dipole, /a0, homogeneously distributed within a spherical cavity of radius a embedded in an anisotropic medium [10-12], by generalizing the Onsager model [13]. For the dipole parallel (perpendicular) to the director, the reaction field is parallel (perpendicular) to the dipole, and can be calculated as [10] ... 

The objective of the polarization model is to relate the material parameters, such as the dielectric properties of both the liquid and solid particles, the particle volume fraction, the electric field strength, etc., to the rheological properties of the whole suspension, in combination with other micro structure features such as fibrillatcd chains. A idealized physical model ER system—an uniform, hard dielectric sphere dispersed in a Newtonian continuous medium, is usually assumed for simplification reason, and this model is thus also called the idealized electrostatic polarization model. The hard sphere means that the particle is uncharged and there are no electrostatic and dispersion interactions between the particles and the dispersing medium before the application of an external electric field. For the idealized electrostatic polarization model, there are roughly two ways to deal with the suspensions One is to consider the Brownian motion of particle, and another is to ignore the Brownian motion and particle inertia. For both cases the anisotropic structure of such a hard sphere suspension is assumed to be represented by the pair correlation function g(r,0), derived by... 

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