Short-time diffusion of anisotropic particles in suspension—A perturbative approach

Abstract

We combine the perturbation approach due to Brenner with the induced force formalism developed by Mazur and coworkers to obtain expressions for the friction and mobility tensors for a suspension of deformed spheres. Specializing to spheroids, we show that our general expressions reduce to previously known results both for an isolated particle and for a pair of particles. Furthermore it appears that the first-order perturbation treatment gives surprisingly accurate results even for large deformations from a spherical geometry. Finally we use the renormalized density fluctuation method due to Beenakker and Mazur to calculate the ensemble average of the one particle mobility over a wide range of particle volume fractions.