This research is concerned with the structure of colloidal materials and 'complex' fluids at high concentrations. It is planned to use and to extend the physically more consistent Rogers- Young form of integral equations for the radial distribution function to develop information on the microstructure. In the past simple 'cell' models and perturbation approaches have been used to map the phase structure as a function of a few practically meaningful physical parameters. This approach is not easy to implement in the case of polydisperse systems, and preliminary calculations indicate that the recently developed Gibbs ensemble Monte Carlo method might prove especially flexible and powerful. A combination of these methods to develop phase diagrams for guiding the selection of processing criteria will be used.
