ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
On the collision of rods in a quiescent fluid.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
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4 citing papers in PubMed, 19 citations in OpenAlex.
- Physical encounters impose a consistency-amount trade-off on bacterial group formation in marine environments.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Encounter rates prime interactions between microorganisms.Interface focus · 2023Review
- Elongation enhances encounter rates between phytoplankton in turbulence.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Influence of pycnocline on settling behaviour of non-spherical particle and wake evolution.Scientific reports · 2020Article
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2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
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Abstract
Rods settling under gravity in a quiescent fluid can overcome the bottleneck associated with aggregation of equal-size spheres because they collide by virtue of their orientation-dependent settling velocity. We find the corresponding collision kernel [Formula: see text], where l, A, and [Formula: see text] are the rods' length, aspect ratio (length divided by width), and volume, respectively, [Formula: see text] is the density difference between rods and fluid, μ is the fluid's dynamic viscosity, g is the gravitational acceleration, and [Formula: see text] is a geometrical parameter. We apply this formula to marine snow formation following a phytoplankton bloom. Over a broad range of aspect ratios, the formula predicts a similar or higher encounter rate between rods as compared to the encounter rate between (equal volume) spheres aggregating either by differential settling or due to turbulence. Since many phytoplankton species are elongated, these results suggest that collisions induced by the orientation-dependent settling velocity can contribute significantly to marine snow formation, and that marine snow composed of elongated phytoplankton cells can form at high rates also in the absence of turbulence.
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