Physical Review Journal Club Returns December 9 at 10 a.m. ET

Physical Review Journal Club: Modeling Complex Particle Suspensions: Perspectives on the Rigid Multiblob Method
Tuesday, December 9, 2025 at 10 a.m. ET
Video Link

Join the Physical Review Journal Club on December 9 for a live discussion with Blaise Delmotte (LadHyX, France) on their recently published Physical Review Fluids Perspective article “Modeling Complex Particle Suspensions: Perspectives on the Rigid Multiblob Method.”

After the presentation, the authors will answer attendee questions in a live Q&A session, moderated by PRFluids Editorial Board member Ehud Yariv (Technion).

Summary:
Numerically modelling complex suspensions, such as microswimmers, colloids, and reactive particles, presents significant hurdles due to several factors:

• The need to model short- and long-range hydrodynamic interactions between tens or hundreds of thousands of particles
• The random motion of small particles caused by thermal fluctuations in the surrounding fluid
• Kinematic constraints in which the movement of certain bodies is restricted while others are free to move
• Additional interactions between particles, such as chemical, electrostatic, or magnetic couplings

In their Perspective article, Blaise Delmotte and Florencio Balboa Usabiaga present recent developments of the rigid multiblob method (RMB) to model suspensions containing a large number of particles of arbitrary shapes and subject to multiple physical couplings, with controllable accuracy and high scalability.

Thanks to its simplicity and versatility, the authors illustrate the use of the RMB method in a wide range of systems that cannot be studied using traditional methods, spanning the fields of biophysics, soft and active matter, rheology, materials science, and colloids.

Read ahead:
Modeling Complex Particle Suspensions: Perspectives on the Rigid Multiblob Method
Blaise Delmotte, Florencio Balboa Usabiaga Phys. Rev. Fluids 10, 100701