On the multiscale description of dilute suspensions of non-Brownian rigid clusters composed of rods

The motion of an ellipsoidal particle immersed in a flow of a Newtonian fluid was obtained in the pioneering work of Jeffery in 1922. Suspensions of industrial interest usually involve particles with a variety of shapes. Moreover, suspensions composed of rods (a limit case of an ellipsoid) aggregate, leading to clusters with particular shapes that exhibit, when immersed in a flow, an almost rigid motion. In this work, we propose a framework for describing dilute suspensions of rigid particles and derive an expression for calculating the motion of rigid clusters of general shape immersed in a flow of a Newtonian fluid. We show that the cluster's rotary velocity only depends on a symmetric tensor c with unit trace that can be considered as the appropriate conformation tensor for describing cluster kinematics. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.