Calculation of the electrostatic force acting on axisymmetric objects in nonuniform electric fields

This paper presents the evaluation of the resultant force acting on an axisymmetric body in an electrostatic field. The objects can be either dielectrics or conductors, charged or uncharged. Basically, the computation is carried out by linking the Maxwell stress tensor to a 2D field calculation program. The main purpose of the work is to create a numerical tool for calculating forces on dielectric and metallic particles in the presence of nonuniform electric fields. As a demonstration, two examples are presented in the paper. One of them, the force on a charged dielectric sphere due to a point charge external to the sphere, has an analytical solution and is therefore used to check the validity of the model. The analytical result verified the approach. The other example is an uncharged ellipsoid placed in a rod-plane gap. The force on the ellipsoid is investigated for different positions in the gap and for different choices of dielectric constant