A New Derivation of Jeffery’s Equation

In this article, we present a modern derivation of Jeffery’s equation for the motion of a small rigid body immersed in a Navier–Stokes flow, using methods of asymptotic analysis. While Jeffery’s result represents the leading order equations of a singularly perturbed flow problem involving ellipsoidal bodies, our formulation is for bodies of general shape and we also derive the equations of the next relevant order.