Inertial effects on the orientation of nearly spherical particles in simple shear flow

Abstract

We investigate theoretically the first effects of inertia on the orientation dynamics of a torque-free spheroidal particle in simple shear flow when the deviation from sphericity is small. The inertialess motion of any axisymmetric particle in simple shear represents a degenerate limit, the spheroidal geometry being a special case; as originally found by Jeffery (Proc. R. Soc. Lond. A, vol. 102, 1922, p. 161), the orientation vector moves indefinitely along any one of a single-parameter family of closed orbits centred around the vorticity axis, the distribution across orbits being determined by initial conditions. We consider both the inertia of the particle and that of the suspending fluid, characterized by the Stokes (.