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 the finite clusters of equally spaced spheres with same size is studied. Putting the Oseen lets on the centres of all the spheres, the series solution of the problem is obtained. By truncating the infinite series and applying the collocation method to solve a set of the linear algebraic equations, the approximate solution of the Oseen flow of finite clusters of spheres and the drag factor for each sphere are presented. The effect of the sphere number and spacing on the drag factor of each sphere under different Reynolds numbers are calculated and the wake effect as well as the shielding effect and the end effect are revealed. The influence of various parameters on the effects is considered and compared with the corresponding results of the Stokes flow. The convergence of the method is also studied numerically in this paper.