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Advective effects in the self-propulsion of autophoretic particles
Autophoretic particles are able to self-propel in low-Reynolds-number flows using short range interactions between their surface and solute molecules produced or consumed by chemical reaction catalyzed at the particle’s surface. The resulting motion is a fundamental example of synthetic particles achieving force-free and torque-free propulsion with no external forcing.
In the well-studied diffusive limit, the solute distribution around the particle is completely decoupled from the hydrodynamics problem. When advection is no longer negligible (e.g. for larger or more chemically-active particles), the solute dynamics is fully coupled with the phoretic flows generated by the solute-particle interactions. In this work, we investigate the effect of this advection on the dynamics of a single spherical particle.