Eur. Phys. J. B 61, 47-58 (2008)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2008-00026-0

Hydrodynamic interaction between two rotating tori

Department of chemical engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, Mumbai, 400076, India

Corresponding author: ^a rochish@che.iitb.ac.in

Received: 13 August 2007
Revised: 29 November 2007
Published online: 18 January 2008

Abstract

The hydrodynamic interactions between two rotating tori is studied. Two kinds of problems are addressed. The interaction between two force free tori is examined, for co and counter rotating cases, which should be relevant in the case of swimming of two toroidal animals and form the basis for interaction of a swarm of such swimmers, apart from the dynamics of a collection of stiff polymer rings. The second problem is the case of two non-translating rotating tori, a possible configuration in toroidal mixers for microfluidic devices. In the former case, analytical expression for translational velocity shows good agreement with the theory in the far field case and show a strong reduction in the velocities in the lubrication limit for the co-rotating case. The velocities are found to monotonically reduce to zero in the case of counter-rotating tori. For the latter case, the expression for velocity field is derived the net force acting on the torus is analytically calculated. The comparison with numerical results is encouraging both in the case of co as well as counter-rotation. The expressions derived for velocities should be useful in estimating pseudo-potentials between such pairs.