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AbstractWe develop a two-timing perturbation analysis to provide quantitative insights on the existence of temporal ratchets in an exemplary system of a particle moving in a tank of fluid in response to an external vibration of the tank. We consider two-mode vibrations with angular frequencies$$\omega $$ $\omega$and$$\alpha \omega $$ $\alpha \omega$, where$$\alpha $$ $\alpha$is a rational number. If$$\alpha $$ $\alpha$is a ratio of odd and even integers (e.g.,$$\tfrac{2}{1},\,\tfrac{3}{2},\,\tfrac{4}{3}$$ $\frac{2}{1},\frac{3}{2},\frac{4}{3}$), the system yields a net response: here, a nonzero time-average particle velocity. Our first-order perturbation solution predicts the existence of temporal ratchets for$$\alpha =2$$ $\alpha =2$. Furthermore, we demonstrate, for a reduced model, that the temporal ratcheting effect for$$\alpha =\tfrac{3}{2}$$ $\alpha =\frac{3}{2}$and$$\tfrac{4}{3}$$ $\frac{4}{3}$appears at the third-order perturbation solution. More importantly, we find closed-form formulas for the magnitude and direction of the induced net velocities for these$$\alpha $$ $\alpha$values. On a broader scale, our methodology offers a new mathematical approach to study the complicated nature of temporal ratchets in physical systems. Graphic abstract 

We develop a linearly scaling variant of the force coupling method [K. Yeo and M. R. Maxey, J. Fluid Mech. 649, 205–231 (2010)] for computing hydrodynamic interactions among particles confined to a doubly periodic geometry with either a single bottom wall or two walls (slit channel) in the aperiodic direction. Our spectrally accurate Stokes solver uses the fast Fourier transform in the periodic xy plane and Chebyshev polynomials in the aperiodic z direction normal to the wall(s). We decompose the problem into two problems. The first is a doubly periodic subproblem in the presence of particles (source terms) with free-space boundary conditions in the z direction, which we solve by borrowing ideas from a recent method for rapid evaluation of electrostatic interactions in doubly periodic geometries [Maxian et al., J. Chem. Phys. 154, 204107 (2021)]. The second is a correction subproblem to impose the boundary conditions on the wall(s). Instead of the traditional Gaussian kernel, we use the exponential of a semicircle kernel to model the source terms (body force) due to the presence of particles and provide optimum values for the kernel parameters that ensure a given hydrodynamic radius with at least two digits of accuracy and rotational and translational invariance. The computation time of our solver, which is implemented in graphical processing units, scales linearly with the number of particles, and allows computations with about a million particles in less than a second for a sedimented layer of colloidal microrollers. We find that in a slit channel, a driven dense suspension of microrollers maintains the same two-layer structure as above a single wall, but moves at a substantially lower collective speed due to increased confinement.