ABSTRACT
As is well known, the motion of small particles in a viscous liquid represents one of the main focuses of engineering research (see, e.g., [30,40] and the references cited therein). Studies on particle-liquid interaction cover a wide range of applications, including manufacturing of short-fiber composites [2,35], separation of macromolecules by electrophoresis [17,18,48,49], flow-induced microstructures [30], models of blood flow [44], and particleladen materials [8]. The presence of the particles affects the flow of the liquid, and this, in turn, affects the motion of the particles, so that the problem of determining the flow characteristics is highly coupled. It is just this latter feature that makes any fundamental problem related to liquid-particle interaction a particularly challenging one.
