Axisymmetric slow viscous flow past an arbitrary convex body of revolution

Abstract

Considerable advances have been made in the past few years in treating a variety of problems in slender-body Stokes flow (Taylor 1969; Batchelor 1970; Cox 1970, 1971; Tillett 1970). However, the problem of treating the creeping motion past bluff objects, whose boundaries do not conform to a constant co-ordinate surface of one of the special orthogonal co-ordinate systems for which the Stokes slow-flow equation is simply separable, is still largely unsolved. In the slender-body Stokes flow studies mentioned above, the viscous-flow boundary-value problem is formulated approximately as an integral equation for an unknown distribution of Stokeslets over a line enclosed by the body. The theory is valid for only very extended shapes, since the error in drag decays inversely as the logarithm of the aspect ratio of the object. By contrast, the present authors show that the boundary-value problem for the axisymmetric flow past an arbitrary convex body of revolution can be formulated exactly as an integral equation for an unknown distribution of ring-like singularities over the surface of the body. The kernel in this integral equation is closely related to the fundamental separable solutions of the Stokes slow-flow equation when written in an oblate spheroidal co-ordinate system of vanishing aspect ratio. The two lowest-order appropriate spheroidal singularities are found to provide a complete description for all surface elements, except those perpendicular to the axis. Higher-order singularities of all orders are required to describe axially perpendicular surfaces, such as the ends of a cylinder or the blunt base of an object. The newly derived integral equation is solved numerically to provide the first theoretical solutions for low aspect ratio cylinders and cones. The theoretically predicted drag results are in excellent agreement with experimentally measured values.