The motion of a cluster of spherical particles in an ideal fluid

The motion of a cluster of an arbitrary number of spherical particles, attached to one another, in an ideal incompressible fluid is considered. Using the previously developed self-consistent field method, an expression is obtained for the virtual mass of the cluster in the form of an explicit function of the coordinates of all the particles. It is shown that, for special cases, the solution obtained is identical with the corresponding results known in the literature. For a statistically uniform particle distribution, using an averaging procedure over all the different possible configurations in the fluid inside a spherical volume, a simple analytic relation is obtained for the average value of the virtual mass of the spherical cluster as a function of its radius in the first approximation with respect to the volume fraction of the particles.