  Exploring the hydrodynamic boundary of a surface by approaching a colloidal
sphere and measuring the occurring drag force is a common experimental
technique. However, numerous parameters like the wettability and surface
roughness influence the result. In experiments these cannot be separated
easily. For a deeper understanding of such surface effects a tool is required
that predicts the influence of different surface properties. In this paper we
present computer simulations based on the lattice Boltzmann method of a sphere
submerged in a Newtonian liquid. We show that our method is able to reproduce
the theoretical predictions for flat and noninteracting surfaces. In order to
provide high precision simulation results the influence of finite size effects
has to be well controlled. Therefore we study the influence of the required
system size and resolution of the sphere and demonstrate that already moderate
computing resources allow the error to be kept below 1%.
