generating randomly oriented non-intersecting cylinders in a unit cell

Hi all,

Im trying to think of a way of generating non-intersecting randomly oriented cylinders within a unit cell volume for micromechanical analysis.

Several research papers suggest a monte-carlo approach was used by displacing cylinders by vectors until the "condition was satisfied" - the condition is never stated.

My initial thought was to treat each cylinder as a line segment, and calculate the minimum distance between line segments, if that distance is > twice the radius of the cylinder, then they should not intersect. However, this also means that co-linear cylinders cannot be closer than twice the radius axially, which is not necessarily a condition i would like to impose.

Anyone have any thoughts on this?