Abstract
A salient difficulty in describing the phase behavior of rodlike particles with large axial ratios
or high packing densities has been the solution of the nonlinear integral equation for the orientation distribution
function. Approximations that do well for small axial ratios and low packing densities become increasingly
unsatisfactory as the axial ratio or the packing density increases. In this report, we demonstrate that solutions
of high accuracy may be obtained relatively efficiently by an iterative procedure that converges particularly
rapidly for systems with high packing densities and large axial ratios. We show that, for polydisperse as well
as monodisperse systems, each iteration moves in a direction of locally decreasing free energy. Although it
does not necessarily follow that the net free energy change in a discrete step will be negative, all cases examined
thus far generate successive distribution functions with monotonically decreasing free energy.