(155b) Force Moments of Active Particles

Active particles are self-driven objects, biological or otherwise, which convert stored or ambient energy into systematic motion. The motion of small active particles in Newtonian fluids has received considerable attention, with interest ranging from understanding biological locomotion to designing artificial micro-swimmers. Active particles moving through fluids generate disturbance flows due to their activity. For simplicity, the induced flow field is often modeled by the leading terms in a far-field approximation of the Stokes equations, whose coefficients are the force, torque and stresslet (zeroth and first-order force moments) of the active particle. In this talk we discuss a systematic way to treat the motion and all hydrodynamic force moments of (one or many) arbitrarily-shaped active particles. As examples of this method, we will discuss modified Faxén laws for active spherical particles and higher-order moments for active rod-like particles.