Abstract
This thesis is devoted to the modelling and mathematical analysis of some aspects of suspension flows.The first chapter concerns the justification of the transport-Stokes equation describing the sedimentation of spherical rigid particles in a Stokes flow where particles rotation is taken into account and inertia is neglected. This work is an extension of former results for a more general set of particles configurations.The second chapter is dedicated to the sedimentation of clusters of particle pairs in a Stokes flow. The derived model is a transport-Stokes equation describing the time evolution of the position and orientation of the cluster. We also investigate the case where the orientation of the cluster is initially correlated to its position. A local existence and uniqueness result for the limit model is provided.In the third chapter, we propose a coupled fluid-kinetic model taking into accountthe radius growth of aerosol particles due to humidity in the respiratory system. We aim to numerically investigate the impact of hygroscopic effects onthe particle behaviour. The air flow is described by the incompressibleNavier-Stokes equations, and the aerosol by a Vlasov-type equation involving the air humidity and temperature, both quantities satisfying a convection-diffusion equation with a source term.The last chapter is dedicated to the analysis of the transport-Stokes equation derived in the first chapter. First we present a global existence and uniqueness result for L¹∩L^∞ initial densities with finite first moment. Secondly, we consider the case where the initial data is the characteristic function of a droplet. We present a local existence and uniqueness result for a regular parametrization of the droplet surface. Finally, we provide some numerical computations that show the regularity breakup of the droplet.