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Updated: Jun 25, 2026

Visually Based Characterization of the Incipient Particle Motion in Regular Substrates: From Laminar to Turbulent Conditions
Published on: February 22, 2018
A nonperturbative approximation for the moderate Reynolds number Navier-Stokes equations
Marcus Roper1, Michael P Brenner
1School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. mroper@seas.harvard.edu
Abstract:
The nonlinearity of the Navier-Stokes equations makes predicting the flow of fluid around rapidly moving small bodies highly resistant to all approaches save careful experiments or brute force computation. Here, we show how a linearization of the Navier-Stokes equations captures the drag-determining features of the flow and allows simplified or analytical computation of the drag on bodies up to Reynolds number of order 100. We illustrate the utility of this linearization in 2 practical problems that normally can only be tackled with sophisticated numerical methods: understanding flow separation in the flow around a bluff body and finding drag-minimizing shapes.
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