tokens: in star formation: both in short bursts (during close passages of the satellite) as well as sustained high star formation rates lasting several Gyrs. In Starkenburg et al. (2016) we show that the general properties of our simulated dwarf systems compare very well to a large sample of dwarf irregular galaxies and blue compact dwarfs from the literature. In this paper we provide a quantitative characterization of the morphological and kinematic properties of the dwarf systems during the minor merger events and thereby facilitate a more detailed comparison to observations. For the analysis we used morphological descriptions that have been applied to characterise where galaxies lie along the Hubble sequence, to disentangle interacting from isolated systems, and to describe the stellar distributions in major mergers of or larger spiral galaxies, such as the CAS (concentration, asymmetry and smoothness) and GM (Gini coefficient and M20) indicators (see e.g. Conselice et al. 2000 ; Conselice 2003 ; Abraham et al. 2003 ; Lotz et al. 2004 , and references therein). These have also been applied to describe the stellar components of isolated irregular dwarf galaxy samples ( Conselice 2003 ; Lotz et al. 2004 ), to characterise the gas distribution in starbursting dwarf galaxies ( Lelli et al. 2014 ) and in simulations of major mergers ( Holwerda et al. 2011a ), as well as a variety of observational samples ( Holwerda et al. 2011b , c , d , e , 2012 , 2013 , 2014 ). This paper is organised as follows. The hydrodynamical simulations are described concisely in Sect. 2 , while in Sect. 3 we focus on one specific simulated system and highlight key tidal features as the merger takes place. In Sect. 4 we introduce the morphological and kinematic indicators used and compare the results to some observational samples. We present a brief comparison to two dwarf galaxies with peculiar properties, namely IC10 and NGC 6822 in Sect. 5 . The summary and conclusions are given in Sect. 6 . 2. Method We analyse the structural properties of dwarf galaxies during minor mergers with dark satellites for a suite of hydrodynamical simulations recently presented in Starkenburg et al. (2016) . The simulations span a range of initial conditions for the dwarf galaxy, its satellite and a variety of orbital configurations for the interaction. They were performed using the OWLS ( Schaye et al. 2010 ) version of Gadget-3 (based on Springel et al. 2001 ; Springel 2005 ) with implementations for star formation and feedback as described in Schaye Dalla Vecchia (2008), Dalla Vecchia Schaye (2008) . Table 2 Parameters for the orbits. Notes. (a) The apo-to-peri ratio is an average for the first pericentric passage for different main and satellite masses and inclinations. Fig. 1 Evolution of the model-A dwarf galaxy with , merging with a 20% mass ratio dark satellite with on a co-planar relatively radial orbit (the intermediate orbit in Table 2 ). All figures show an inclined view of the
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