Boundary element method calculations of the mobility of nonspherical particles—3. Parallel implementation for long chains

A boundary element formulation for implementation on computers with massively parallel architecture, which allows calculation of particle drag and torque for particle agglomerates, is described. Shape factors for long, linear chains of spheres translating through a quiescent fluid are calculated. These calculations show that the correlation presented in an earlier paper (Geller et al., 1993), which was based on boundary element results for much shorter chains, continues to hold for chains of up to 700 constituent spheres; and, as expected, the slender body results, also presented by Geller and coworkers (1993), more closely agree with the numerical results for these longer chains.