The dynamical behavior of suspensions of rod‐like particles is explored in unsteady elementary flows characterized by the following special property: while there may be arbitrarily large excursions from an initial state by the carrier fluid, the fluid returns to the initial state at the end of the time interval. In such aclosedflow, it is shown that the orientation distribution of a dilute non‐Brownian suspension will also return to its initial state, after arbitrarily large excursions driven by the flow of the carrier fluid. In contrast, the orientation distribution in a Brownian suspension will not return to its initial state at the end of the interval in a closed flow. These effects are exploited in a constrained nonlinear optimal control problem for the orientation distribution of a Brownian suspension in an example closed flow. The result of the control problem is a family of protocols that are most effective at achieving various degrees of anisotropy of the suspension, within the class of flows under consideration. ©1996 American Institute of Physics.