Self-chemophoresis in the thin diffuse interface approximation

Abstract

Self-chemophoresis is an appealing and quite successful interpretation of the motility exhibited by certain chemically active colloidal particles suspended in a solution of their ‘fuel’: the particle has a phoretic response to self-generated, rather than externally imposed, inhomogeneities in the chemical composition of the solution. The postulated mechanism of chemophoresis is the interaction of the particle (via an adsorption potential) with the chemical inhomogeneities in the surrounding medium. When the range of this interaction is much smaller than any other relevant scale in the system, the (translational and rotational) phoretic velocities can be described in terms of a phoretic coefficient and a slip fluid velocity at the surface of the particle. Using the case of a spherical particle as a simple and physically insightful example, here we exploit an integral representation of the rigid-body motion to critically re-examine this framework. The systematic analysis highlights two steps in the approximation: first the thin–layer approximation (very large particle size), and subsequently a lubrication approximation (slow variation of the adsorption potential along the tangential direction). We also discuss how these approximations could be relaxed and the effect of this on the particle's motion.