Direct numerical simulations of rigid body dispersions. I. Mobility/friction tensors of assemblies of spheres

An improved formulation of the "Smoothed Profile" method is introduced to perform direct numerical simulations of arbitrary rigid body dispersions in a Newtonian host solvent. Previous implementations of the method were restricted to spherical particles, severely limiting the types of systems that could be studied. The validity of the method is carefully examined by computing the friction/mobility tensors for a wide variety of geometries and comparing them to reference values obtained from accurate solutions to the Stokes-Equation.