Shear flow over a particulate or fibrous plate

Simple shear flow over a porous plate consisting of a planar array of particles is studied as a model of flow over a membrane. The main objective is to compute the slip velocity defined with reference to the velocity profile far above the plate, and the drift velocity induced by the shear flow underneath the plate. The difference between these two velocities is shown to be proportional to the thickness of the plate. When the geometry of the particle array is anisotropic, the directions of the slip and drift velocity are generally different from the direction of the overpassing shear flow. An integral formulation is developed to describe flow over a plate consisting of a periodic lattice of particles with arbitrary shape, and integral representations for the velocity and pressure are developed in terms of the doubly-periodic Green’s function of three-dimensional Stokes flow. Based on the integral representation, asymptotic expressions for the slip and drift velocity are derived to describe the limit where the particle size is small compared to the inter-particle separation, and numerical results are presented for spherical and spheroidal particles of arbitrary size. The asymptotic results are found to be accurate over an extended range of particle sizes. To study the limit of small plate porosity, the available solution for shear flow over a plane wall with a circular orifice is used to describe flow over a plate with a homogeneous distribution of circular perforations, and expressions for the slip and drift velocity are derived. Corresponding results are presented for axial and transverse shear now over a periodic array of cylinders arranged distributed in a plane. Streamline pattern illustrations confirm that a negative drift velocity is due to the onset of eddies between closely-spaced particles.