Particle stress in suspensions of soft objects

In a suspension of extended objects such as colloidal particles, capsules or vesicles, the contribution of particles to the stress is usually evaluated by first determining the stress originating from a single particle (e. g. via integrating the fluid stress over the surface of a particle) and then adding up the contributions of individual particles. While adequate for a computation of the average stress over the entire system, this approach fails to correctly reproduce the local stress. In this work, we propose and validate a variant of the method of planes which overcomes this problem. The method is particularly suited for many-body interactions arising from, for example, shear and bending rigidity of red blood cells.