In this paper, we study the dynamics of a small rigid body in a viscous incompressible fluid in dimension two and three. More precisely we investigate the trajectory of the rigid body in the limit when its mass and its size tend to zero. We show that the velocity of the center of mass of the rigid body coincides with the background fluid velocity in the limit. We are able to consider the limit when the volume of the rigid bodies converges to zero while their densities are a fixed constant.

In this paper we study the evolution of a small rigid body in a viscous incompressible fluid, in particular we show that a small particle is not accelerated by the fluid in the limit when its size converges to zero under a lower bound on its mass. This result is based on a new a priori estimate on the velocities of the centers of mass of rigid bodies that holds in the case when their masses are also allowed to decrease to zero.