The hydrodynamic force on a rigid particle undergoing arbitrary time-dependent motion at small Reynolds number

The hydrodynamic force acting on a rigid spherical particle translating with arbitrary time-dependent motion in a time-dependent flowing fluid is calculated to O ( Re ) for small but finite values of the Reynolds number, Re , based on the particle's slip velocity relative to the uniform flow. The corresponding expression for an arbitrarily shaped rigid particle is evaluated for the case when the timescale of variation of the particle's slip velocity is much greater than the diffusive scale, a 2 / v , where a is the characteristic particle dimension and v is the kinematic viscosity of the fluid. It is found that the expression for the hydrodynamic force is not simply an additive combination of the results from unsteady Stokes flow and steady Oseen flow and that the temporal decay to steady state for small but finite Re is always faster than the t -½ behaviour of unsteady Stokes flow. For example, when the particle accelerates from rest the temporal approach to steady state scales as t -2 .