The motion of a rigid body in viscous fluid bounded by a plane wall

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
The boundary-integral method is used to calculate the hydrodynamic force and torque on an arbitrary body of revolution whose axis of symmetry is oriented at an arbitrary angle relative to a planar wall in the zero-Reynolds-number limit. The singular solution of the Stokes equations in the presence of a planar wall is used to formulate the integral equations, which are then reduced to a system of linear algebraic equations by satisfying the no-slip boundary conditions on the body surface using the boundary collocation method or weighted residual technique.Numerical tests for the special case of a sphere moving parallel or perpendicular to a planar wall show that the present theory is accurate to at least three significant figures when compared with the exact solutions for gap widths as small as only one-tenth of the particle radius. Higher accuracy can be achieved and solutions can be obtained for smaller gap widths at the expense of more computation time and larger storage requirements.The hydrodynamic force and torque on a spheroid with varying aspect ratio and orientation angle relative to the planar wall are obtained. The theory is also applied to study the motion of a toroidal particle or biconcave shaped disc adjacent to a planar wall. The coincidence of the drag and torque of a biconcave-shaped body and a torus having an aspect ratio b/a = 2 with the same surface area shows that in this case the hole of a torus has little influence on the flow field. On the other hand, for an aspect ratio b/a = 10, the effect of the hole is significant. It is also shown that when the body is not very close to the wall, an oblate spheroid can be used as a good approximation of a biconcave-shaped disc.