Motion of spheres along a fluid-gas interface

A system of many spherical particles, suspended in a quiescent fluid and touching a planar free fluid-gas interface, is considered. Stick fluid boundary conditions at the sphere surfaces are assumed. The free surface boundary conditions are taken into account with the use of the method of images. For such a quasi-two-dimensional system, the one-sphere resistance operator is calculated numerically. Moreover, the corresponding friction and mobility tensors are constructed from irreducible multipole expansion. Finally, the long-distance terms of the two-sphere mobility tensor are evaluated explicitly up to the order of 1/r(3), where r is the interparticle distance. Experiments which have motivated this work are outlined. (C) 2004 American Institute of Physics.