To avoid confusion on this point we have replaced this statement with the following: “We find that these errors are infrequent and acceptable as a trade-off for increased computational performance.” We have also added a comment to Section 2.5 regarding the Lennard–Jones interaction: “The attractive force has a short range, and is practically zero at h = 2θ.”
It seems a little odd to posit an attractive force in the derivation (Equation (12)) and then ignore/dismiss it in the numerics (“… in reality the attractive force does not really exist, trichomes only cohere after they have come into contact” page 12). Clearly, this is done to (quite reasonably) avoid modeling steric interactions with hard bodies. It was a little distracting to think that sticky adhesion was decaying like 6 ( ) h Θ . Perhaps note after Equation (12) that the attractive force decreases to zero at a finite distance in the numerics.