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Coagulation of Particles Coulomb Forces For charged particles, the Coulomb force potential is given as
where |
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is
the dielectric constant of the medium.
The expression for W then is given by
| (25) |
where
| (26) |
is the ratio of the electrostatic potential energy at contact to the thermal energy kT.
For 
and
the collision rate decreases.
For large numbers of charged particles, the Coulomb potential must be modified to account for Debye shielding effects. Accordingly, equation (26) is replaced by
| (27) |