THE THREE-DIMENSIONAL FUNDAMENTAL SOLUTION TO STOKES FLOW IN THE OBLATE SPHEROIDAL COORDINATES WITH APPLICATIONS TO MULTIPLES SPHEROID PROBLEMS

A new three-dimensional fundamental solution to the Stokes flow was proposed by transforming the solid harmonic functions in Lamb's solution into expressions in terms Of the oblate spheroidal coordinates. These fundamental solutions are advantageous in treating flows past an arbitrary number of arbitrarily positioned and oriented oblate spheroids. The least squares technique was adopted herein so that the convergence difficulties often encountered in solving three-dimensional problems were completely avoided. The examples demonstrate that present approach is highly accurate, consistently stable and computationally efficient. The oblate spheroid may be used to model a variety of particle shapes between a circular disk and a sphere. For the first time, the effect of various geometric factors on the forces and torques exerted on two oblate spheroids were systematically studied by using the proposed fundamental solutions. The generality of this approach was illustrated by two problems of three spheroids.

Dielectric Behavior of Oblate Spheroidal Particles：Application to Erythrocytes Suspensions

We have investigated the pressure effect on the eletrorotation (ER) spectrum of living cell suspensions byconsidering the particle shape effect. In particular, we consider coated oblate spheroidal particles and present a theoreticalstudy of ER based on the spectral representation theory. Analytic expressions for the characteristic frequency as wellas the dispersion strength can be obtained, thus simplifying the fitting of experimental data on oblate spheroidal cellsthat abound in the literature. From the theoretical analysis, we find that the cellshape, coating as well as materialparameters can change the ER spectrum. We demonstrate a good agreement between our theoretical predictions andexperimental data on human erthrocytes suspensions.

Riemannian Acceleration in Oblate Spheroidal Coordinate System

The planetary bodies are more of a spheroid than they are a sphere thereby making it necessary to describe motions in a spheroidal coordinate system. Using the oblate spheroidal coordinate system, a more approximate and realistic description of motion in these bodies can be realized. In this paper, we derive the Riemannian acceleration for motion in oblate spheroidal coordinate system using the golden metric tensor in oblate spheroidal coordinates. The Riemannian acceleration in the oblate spheroidal coordinate system reduces to the pure Newtonian acceleration in the limit of c0 and contains post-Newtonian correction terms of all orders of c-2. The result obtained thereby opens the way for further studies and applications of the motion of particles in oblate spheroidal coordinate system.

On the Axisymmetric Steady Incompressible Beltrami Flows

In this paper, Beltrami vector fields in several orthogonal coordinate systems are obtained analytically and numerically. Specifically, axisymmetric incompressible inviscid steady state Beltrami (Trkalian) fluid flows are obtained with the motivation to model flows that have been hypothesized to occur in tornadic flows. The studied coordinate systems include those that appear amenable to modeling such flows: the cylindrical, spherical, paraboloidal, and prolate and oblate spheroidal systems. The usual Euler equations are reformulated using the Bragg-Hawthorne equation for the stream function of the flow, which is solved analytically or numerically in each coordinate system under the assumption of separability of variables. Many of the obtained flows are visualized via contour plots of their stream functions in the rz-plane. Finally, the results are combined to provide a qualitative quasi-static model for a progression of tornado-like flows that develop as swirl increases. The results in this paper are equally applicable in electromagnetics, where the equivalent concept is that of a force-free magnetic field.