  Purely entropic systems such as suspensions of hard rods, platelets and
spheres show rich phase behavior. Rods and platelets have successfully been
used as models to predict the equilibrium properties of liquid crystals for
several decades. Over the past years hard particle models have also been
studied in the context of non-equilibrium statistical mechanics, in particular
regarding the glass transition, jamming, sedimentation and crystallization.
Recently suspensions of hard anisotropic particles also moved into the focus of
materials scientists who work on conducting soft matter composites. An
insulating polymer resin that is mixed with conductive filler particles becomes
conductive when the filler percolates. In this context the mathematical topic
of connectivity percolation finds an application in modern nano-technology. In
this article, we briefly review recent work on the phase behavior, confinement
effects, percolation transition and phase transition kinetics in hard particle
models. In the first part, we discuss the effects that particle anisotropy and
depletion have on the percolation transition. In the second part, we present
results on the kinetics of the liquid-to-crystal transition in suspensions of
spheres and of ellipsoids.
