Depletion from a hard wall induced by aggregation and gelation.

Diffusion-limited cluster aggregation and gelation of hard spheres is simulated using off-lattice Monte Carlo simulations. A comparison is made of the wall-particle correlation function with the particle-particle correlation function over a range of volume fractions, both for the initial system of randomly distributed spheres and for the final gel state. For randomly distributed spheres the correlation functions are compared with theoretical results using the Ornstein-Zernike equation and the Percus-Yevick closure. At high volume fractions (phi > 40%) gelation has little influence on the correlation function, but for phi < 10% it is a universal function of the distance normalized by correlation length (xi) of the bulk. The width of the depletion layer is about 0.5xi. The concentration increases as a power law from the wall up to r approximately = xi, where it reaches a weak maximum before decreasing to the bulk value.