New Physical Ideas and Method of Description and Calculation of Resistance to Motion of Small Particles in a Gaseous Medium

Abstract

New ideas and a new approach to the motion of small–including nanosized–particles are presented, resting on basic concepts of the molecular kinetic theory of gases, statistical physics, and classical mechanics. Two new concepts are introduced: the λ-layer and “counter-moving” pairs of molecules. The first makes it possible to limit the number of molecules under consideration and ignore their collisions with each other. The second makes it possible to exclude Brownian motion of the molecules. It is established that the action of potential van der Waals forces is localized in the vicinity of the small particle in such a way that it is possible in the statistical calculations to assume that the trajectories of the molecules consist of line segments and that impact of a molecule is perfectly elastic and equivalent to impact on an “effective particle” with linear dimension 40% higher than the actual diameter of the particle. Good agreement is obtained with the experimental Cunningham–Millikan–Davies (CMD) approximation, and also with extrapolated values of this approximation.