Fast and accurate solvers for simulating Janus particle suspensions in Stokes flow

TL;DR

This paper introduces a fast, spectrally accurate boundary integral method for simulating suspensions of Janus particles in Stokes flow, enabling efficient analysis of their complex collective behaviors.

Contribution

The authors develop a novel computational framework combining spherical harmonic expansions and fast summation techniques for simulating Janus particle suspensions with high accuracy and efficiency.

Findings

Demonstrated spectral accuracy in boundary integral evaluations.

Achieved optimal O(n) scaling with particle number.

Showcased diverse self-assembly behaviors in biomedical applications.

Abstract

We present a novel computational framework for simulating suspensions of rigid spherical Janus particles in Stokes flow. We show that long-range Janus particle interactions for a wide array of applications may be resolved using fast, spectrally accurate boundary integral methods tailored to polydisperse suspensions of spherical particles. These are incorporated into our rigid body Stokes platform. Our approach features the use of spherical harmonic expansions for spectrally accurate integral operator evaluation, complementarity-based collision resolution, and optimal O(n) scaling with the number of particles when accelerated via fast summation techniques. We demonstrate the flexibility of our platform through three key examples of Janus particle systems prominent in biomedical applications: amphiphilic, bipolar electric and phoretic particles. We formulate Janus particle interactions in boundary integral form and showcase characteristic self-assembly and complex collective behavior for each particle type.