The drag on two spheres in contact in the slip flow regime (Q1087426)

The drag on two equal spheres in rigid contact falling along their line of centres is calculated in the slip flow regime. Standard viscous flow theory is employed with the necessary slip boundary conditions. The drag is seen to depend on the ratio \(\lambda =\ell /a\), where \(\ell\) is the mean free path of an atom in the surrounding gas and 'a' is the radius of the sphere. Two exact limiting cases are obtained for the drag, viz: small \(\lambda\) and large \(\lambda\), and a useful interpolation formula is derived by means of a variational principle. The equivalent sphere approximation is found to give satisfactory results.