Rods falling near a vertical wall

Abstract

As an inclined rod sediments in an unbounded viscous fluid it will drift horizontally but will not rotate. When it approaches a vertical wall, the rod rotates and so turns away from the wall. Illustrative experiments and a slender-body theory of this phenomenon are presented. In an incidental study the friction coefficients for an isolated rod are found by numerical solution of the slender-body integral equation. These friction coefficients are compared with the asymptotic results of Batchelor (1970) and the numerical results of Youngren ' Acrivos (1975), who did not make a slender-body approximation.