THE OSEEN FLOW OF FINITE CLUSTERS OF SPHERES AND THE WAKE EFFECT ON THE DRAG FACTOR

In this paper,the wake effect on drag factor in the axisymmetric Oseen flow of thefinite clusters of equally spaced spheres with same size is studied.Putting the Oseen lets on thecentres of all the spheres,the series solution of the problem is obtained,By truncating the infiniteseries and applying the collocation method to solve a set of the linear algebraic equations,theapproximate solution of the Oseen flow of finite clusters of spheres and the drag factor for eachsphere are presented.The effect of tbe sphere number and spacing on the drag factor of each sphere under differentReynolds numbers are calculated and the wake effect as well as the shielding effect and the end effectare revealed.The influence of various parameters on the effects is considered and compared with thecorresponding results of the Stokes flow.The convergence of the method is also studied numericallyin this paper.