  When dissipative particles are left alone, their fluctuation energy decays
due to collisional interactions, clusters build up and grow with time until the
system size is reached. When the effective dissipation is strong enough, this
may lead to the `inelastic collapse', i.e. the divergence of the collision
frequency of some particles. The cluster growth is an interesting physical
phenomenon, whereas the inelastic collapse is an intrinsic effect of the
inelastic hard sphere (IHS) model used to study the cluster growth - involving
only a negligible number of particles in the system. Here, we extend the IHS
model by introducing an elastic contact energy and the related contact duration
t_c. This avoids the inelastic collapse and allows to examine the long-time
behavior of the system. For a quantitative description of the cluster growth,
we propose a burning - like algorithm in continuous space, that readily
identifies all particles that belong to the same cluster. The criterion for
this is here chosen to be only the particle distance.
  With this method we identify three regimes of behavior. First, for short
times a homogeneous cooling state (HCS) exists, where a mean-field theory works
nicely, and the clusters are tiny and grow very slowly. Second, at a certain
time which depends on the system's properties, cluster growth starts and the
clusters increase in size and mass until, in the third regime, the system size
is reached and most of the particles are collected in one huge cluster.
