Semi-analytical method of calculating the electrostatic interaction of colloidal solutions

We present a semi-analytical method of calculating the electrostatic interaction of colloid solutions for confined and unconfined systems. We expand the electrostatic potential of the system in terms of some basis functions such as spherical harmonic function and cylinder function. The expansion coefficients can be obtained by solving the equations of the boundary conditions, combining an analytical translation transform of the coordinates and a numerical multipoint collection method. The precise electrostatic potential and the interaction energy are then obtained automatically. The method is available not only for the uniformly charged colloids but also for nonuniformly charged ones. We have successfully applied it to unconfined diluted colloid system and some confined systems such as the long cylinder wall confinement, the air–water interfacial confinement and porous membrane confinement. The consistence checks of our calculations with some known analytical cases have been made for all our applications. In theory, the method is applicable to any dilute colloid solutions with an arbitrary distribution of the surface charge on the colloidal particle under a regular solid confinement, such as spherical cavity confinement and lamellar confinement. (paper)