Slow viscous flow of two porous spherical particles translating along the axis of a cylinder

Abstract

We describe the motion of two freely moving porous spherical particles located along the axis of a cylindrical tube with background Poiseuille flow at low Reynolds number. The stream function and a framework based on cylindrical harmonics are adopted to solve the flow field around the particles and the flow within the tube, respectively. The two solutions are employed in an iterated framework using the method of reflections. We first consider the case of two identical particles, followed by two particles with different dimensions. In both cases, the drag force coefficients of the particles are solved as functions of the separation distance between the particles and the permeability of the particles. The detailed flow field in the vicinity of the two particles is investigated by plotting the streamlines and velocity contours. We find that the particle–particle interaction is dependent on the separation distance, particle sizes and permeability of the particles. Our analysis reveals that when the permeability of the particles is large, the streamlines are more parallel and the particle–particle interaction has less effect on the particle motion. We further show that a smaller permeability and bigger particle size generally tend to squeeze the streamlines and velocity contour towards the wall.