When depositing particles repel each other, the deposition will stop by the time when enough particles have deposited. At one point, such a surface layer will repel any particles that may still make attempts to deposit. The surface is said to be saturated or blocked by the deposited particles. The blocking process can be described by the following equation 
where  is the surface blocking function. When there are no deposited particles,  and . With increasing number density of deposited particles, the blocking function decreases. The surface saturates at  and . The simplest blocking function is
and it is referred to as the Langmuir blocking function, as it is related to the Langmuir isotherm.
The blocking process has been studied in detail in terms of the random sequential adsorption (RSA) model. The simplest RSA model related to deposition of spherical particles considers irreversible adsorption of circular disks. One disk after another is placed randomly at a surface. Once a disk is placed, it sticks at the same spot, and cannot be removed. When an attempt to deposit a disk would result in an overlap with an already deposited disk, this attempt is rejected. Within this model, the surface is initially filled rapidly, but the more one approaches saturation the slower the surface is being filled. Within the RSA model, saturation is referred to as jamming. For circular disks, jamming occurs at a coverage of 0.547. When the depositing particles are polydisperse, much higher surface coverage can be reached, since the small particles will be able to deposit into the holes in between the larger deposited particles. On the other hand, rod like particles may lead to much smaller coverage, since a few misaligned rods may block a large portion of the surface.
Since the repulsion between particles in aqueous suspensions originates from electric double layer forces, the presence of salt has an important effect on surface blocking. For small particles and low salt, the diffuse layer will extend far beyond the particle, and thus create an exclusion zone around it. Therefore, the surface will be blocked at a much lower coverage than what would be expected based on the RSA model.  At higher salt and for larger particles, this effect is less important, and the deposition can be well described by the RSA model.