The flow of a model suspension fluid past a sphere

The paper is concerned with the flow of a dilute suspension of monosized spheroids past a sphere placed at the centerline of a cylindrical tube. The suspension is modeled by the transversely isotropic fluid model and the numerical solution is obtained by a time-dependent boundary element method. No steady-state solution to the problem was found. However, the amplitude of the long-time oscillations in the drag force on the sphere is only about 1% of its mean value at a solid volume concentration of 0.01 and an aspect ratio of 10 for the spheroids. The initial orientation of the microstructure has a small effect on the drag force: it can give rise to a ±1% variation in the drag force at large time