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Analytical analysis reveals how thermal and optical forces affect particle migration in suspensions, highlighting key fluid dynamics.
An analysis is presented for the steady thermophoresis and photophoresis of a homogeneous dispersion of identical aerosol spheres of typical physical properties and surface characteristics. The analysis assumes a moderately small Knudsen number (less than about 0.1), such that the gas motion lies within the slip-flow regime, including thermal creep, temperature jump, thermal stress slip, and frictional slip at the particle surfaces. Under conditions of low Peclet and Reynolds numbers, the coupled momentum and energy equations are analytically solved using a unit cell approach that explicitly incorporates interparticle interactions. Closed-form expressions are derived for the mean particle migration velocities in both thermophoresis driven by a uniform temperature gradient and photophoresis induced by an incident radiation field. The results reveal that the normalized particle velocities, referenced to those of an isolated particle, generally decrease with increasing particle volume fraction, though exceptions occur for thermophoresis. While thermal stress slip and thermal creep exert no influence on the normalized thermophoretic velocity, they markedly affect the normalized photophoretic velocity, which rises with the thermal stress slip to the thermal creep coefficient ratio. For both phenomena, the normalized migration velocities increase monotonically with the particle-to-fluid thermal conductivity ratio.
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Chen et al. (2026) studied this question.
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